gainst new immigrations, while, at the same time, the
waves of the Indian Ocean kept watch over the southern borders of the
peninsula. None of the great conquerors of antiquity,--Sesostris,
Semiramis, Nebuchadnezzar, or Cyrus,--disturbed the peaceful seats of
these Aryan settlers. Left to themselves in a world of their own,
without a past, and without a future before them, they had nothing but
themselves to ponder on. Struggles there must have been in India also.
Old dynasties were destroyed, whole families annihilated, and new
empires founded. Yet the inward life of the Hindu was not changed by
these convulsions. His mind was like the lotus leaf after a shower of
rain has passed over it; his character remained the same, passive,
meditative, quiet, and thoughtful. A people of this peculiar stamp was
never destined to act a prominent part in the history of the world;
nay, the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they
lived could not but exercise a detrimental influence on the active and
moral character of the Indians. Social and political virtues were
little cultivated, and the ideas of the useful and the beautiful
hardly known to them. With all this, however, they had, what the Greek
was as little capable of imagining, as they were of realising the
elements of Grecian life. They shut their eyes to this world of
outward seeming and activity, to open them full on the world of
thought and rest. The ancient Hindus were a nation of philosophers,
such as could nowhere have existed except in India, and even there in
early times alone. It is with the Hindu mind as if a seed were placed
in a hothouse. It will grow rapidly, its colours will be gorgeous, its
perfume rich, its fruits precocious and abundant. But never will it be
like the oak growing in wind and weather, and striking its roots into
real earth, and stretching its branches into real air beneath the
stars and the sun of heaven. Both are experiments, the hothouse flower
and the Hindu mind; and as experiments, whether physiological or
psychological, both deserve to be studied.

We may divide the whole Aryan family into two branches, the northern
and the southern. The northern nations, Celts, Greeks, Romans,
Germans, and Slavonians, have each one act allotted to them on the
stage of history. They have each a national character to support. Not
so the southern tribes. They are absorbed in the struggles of thought,
their past is the problem of creation, the