as the brain-mind of
either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such
conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's. There was an evolution
upward and inward; from Chaucer's school-boy vision, to
Swinburne's (in that one book) clear sight of the Soul.

We appear to find in Sanskrit literature,--I speak in a very
general sense,--also such great main epochs or cycles. First a
reign of Plenydd, of Vision,--in the Age of the Sacred Books.
Then a reign of Gwron,--in the Age of the heroic Epics. Then a
reign of Alawn, in the Age of the Drama.

But the direction is all opposite. The cycle is not upward, from
the sough of a beastly Iron Age towards the luminance of a coming
Golden; but downward from the peaks and splendors of the Age of
Gold to where the outlook is on to this latter hell's-gulf
of years. Plenydd, when he first touched English eyes, he
was Plenydd the Lord of Spiritual vision, the Seer into the
Eternities. Wordsworth at his highest only approaches,--
Swinburne in _Hertha_ halts at the portals of, the Upanishads.

Now, what may this indicate? To my mind, this: that you are not
to take these Sanskrit Sacred Books as the fruitage of a single
literary age. They do not correspond with, say, the Elizabethan,
or the Nineteenth-Century, poetry of England; but are rather the
cream of the output of a whole period as long (at least) as that
of all English literature; the blossoming of a Racial Mind
during (at least) a manvantara of fifteen hundred years. I do
not doubt that the age that gave birth to the _Katha-Upanishad,_
gave birth to all manner of other things also; flippancies and
trivialities among the rest;--just as in the same England, and in
the same years, Milton was dictating _Samson Agonistes,_ and
Butler was writing the stinging scurrilities of _Hudibras._ But
the Sanskrit Hudibrases are lost; as the English one will be,
even if it takes millenniums to lose it. Full-flowing time has
washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left
standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The
Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide _Paradise Lost;_ it made
the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron;
the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the
latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference:
all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,--Dante and
Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away
the imperman