ing
Vikramaditya leads out his armies, and to victory; and the Nine
Gems of Literature sing at his court. It is a backwash from Han
Wuti's China, that goes west with Chang Ch'ien to the Yueh Chi,
and south with them into India. And we can look for no apex of
literary creation at this time, either in China or Europe. In
the Roman literature of that cycle it is the keen creative note
we miss: Virgil, the nearest to it, cannot be said to have
possessed quite; and Han literature was probably its first
culmination under Han Wuti, and its second under the Eastern
Hans. One suspects that great creation is generally going on
somewhere, and is not displeased to find hints of its presence in
India; is inclined to think this may have been, after all,
the Golden Age of the Sanskrit Drama.--At which there can be
at any rate no harm in taking a glance at this point; and,
retrospectively, at Sanskrit literature as a whole;--a desperately
inadequate glance, be it said.

I ask you here to remember the three periods of English Poetry,
with their characteristics; and you must not mind my using my
Welsh god-names in connexion with them. First, then, there was
the Period of Plenydd,--of the beginnings of _Vision;_ when the
eyes of Chaucer and his lyricist predecessors were opened to the
world out-of-doors; when they began to see that the skies were
blue, fields and forests green; that there were flowers in
the meadows and woodlands; and that all these things were
delectable. Then there was the Period of Gwron, Strength; when
Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton evolved the Grand Manner;
when they made the great March-Music, unknown in English before,
and hardly achieved by anyone since:--the era of the great
Warrior-poetry of the Tragedies and of _Paradise Lost._ Then
came, with Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the Age of Alawn,
lasting on until today; when the music of intonation brought
with it romance and mystery and Natural Magic with its rich glow
and wizard insight. And you will remember how English Poetry, on
the uptrend of a major cycle, is a reaching from the material
towards the spiritual, a growth toward that. Though Milton and
Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,--by virtue of a cosmic
force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,--you
cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such
clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in
Swinburne's _Songs before Sunrise;_ nor w