hat sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the water's fathomless abyss?
There was not death--yet was there nought immortal,
There was no confine betwixt day and night;
The only One breathed breathless by itself,
Other than It there nothing since has been.
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound--an ocean without light--
The germ that still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.
Then first came love upon it, the new spring
Of mind--yea, poets in their hearts discerned,
Pondering, this bond between created things
And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth
Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven?
Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose--
Nature below, and power and will above--
Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here,
Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
The Gods themselves came later into being--
Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
He from whom all this great creation came,
Whether his will created or was mute,
The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it--or perchance even He knows not.

The grammar of the Veda (to turn from the contents to the structure of
the work) is important in many respects. The difference between it and
the grammar of the epic poems would be sufficient of itself to fix the
distance between these two periods of language and literature. Many
words have preserved in these early hymns a more primitive form, and
therefore agree more closely with cognate words in Greek or Latin.
Night, for instance, in the later Sanskrit is ni_s_a, which is a form
peculiarly Sanskritic, and agrees in its derivation neither with nox
nor with [Greek: nyx]. The Vaidik na_s_ or nak, night, is as near to
Latin as can be. Thus mouse in the common Sanskrit is mushas or
mushika, both derivative forms if compared with the Latin mus, muris.
The Vaidik Sanskrit has preserved the same primitive noun in the
plural mush-as = Lat. mures. There are other words in the Veda which
were lost altogether in the later Sanskrit, while they were preserved
in Greek and Latin. Dyaus, sky, does not occur as a masculine in the
ordinary Sanskrit; it occurs in the Veda, and thus bears witness to
the early Aryan worship of Dyaus, the Greek Zeus. Ushas, dawn, again
in the later Sanskrit is neuter. In the Veda it is feminine; and even
the secondary