llions pass away unheeded, and the few only to whom has been
given the gift of fusing speech and thought into forms of beauty
remain as witnesses of the past.

If then we speak of times so distant as those represented by the
Rig-Veda, and of a country so disintegrated, or rather as yet so
little integrated as India was three thousand years ago, surely it
requires but little reflection to know that what we see in the Vedic
poems are but a few snow-clad peaks, representing to us, from a far
distance, the whole mountain-range of a nation, completely lost beyond
the horizon of history. When we speak of the Vedic hymns as
representing the religion, the thoughts and customs of India three
thousand years ago, we cannot mean by India more than some unknown
quantity of which the poets of the Veda are the only spokesmen left.
When we now speak of India, we think of 250 millions, a sixth part of
the whole human race, peopling the vast peninsula from the Himalayan
mountains between the arms of the Indus and the Ganges, down to Cape
Comorin and Ceylon, an extent of country nearly as large as Europe. In
the Veda the stage on which the life of the ancient kings and poets is
acted, is the valley of the Indus and the Punjab, as it is now called,
the Sapta Sindhasa_h_, the Seven Rivers of the Vedic poets. The land
watered by the Ganges is hardly known, and the whole of the Dekkan
seems not yet to have been discovered.

Then again, when these Vedic hymns are called the lucubrations of a
few priests, not the outpourings of the genius of a whole nation, what
does that mean? We may no doubt call these ancient Vedic poets
priests, if we like, and no one would deny that their poetry is
pervaded not only by religious, mythological, and philosophical, but
likewise by sacrificial and ceremonial conceits. Still a priest, if we
trace him back far enough, is only a _presbyteros_ or an elder, and,
as such, those Vedic poets had a perfect right to speak in the name of
a whole class, or of the village community to which they belonged.
Call Vasish_th_a a priest by all means, only do not let us imagine
that he was therefore very like Cardinal Manning.

After we have made every possible concession to arguments, most of
which are purely hypothetical, there remains this great fact that
here, in the Rig-Veda, we have poems, composed in perfect language, in
elaborate metre, telling us about gods and men, about sacrifices and
battles, about the varying aspe