encies of that ancient age, and left standing but the
rock-built palaces of the Soul; and these,--not complete,
perhaps;--repaired to a degree by hands more foolish;--a little
ruinous in places,--but the ruins grander and brighter than all
the pomps, all the new-fangled castles of genii, of later times,
--come down to us as the Sacred Books of India, the oldest extant
literature in the world. How old? We may put their epoch well
before the death of Krishna in 3102 B. C.,--well before the
opening of the Kali-Yuga; we may say that it lasted a very long
time;--and be content that if all scholarship, all western and
modern opinion, laughs at us now,--the laugh will probably be
with us when we have been dead a long time. Or perhaps sooner.

They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-classical literature,
wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great
manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation. These
three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas,
and the Upanishads. The Vedas consist of hymns to the Gods;
and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the Gods
a sufficient expression of religion. Where, say, Reincarnation
was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one
doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it:
--you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up
in the morning--or not as a rule. You make poems upon a reaction
of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,--
and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful and
Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire,
the Winds and Waters. Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in
them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of
Eternal Beauty. It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as
some folk do, a 'primitive' state of society; we have not the
keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people
among whom those hymns arose. Poetry in every succeeding age has
had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her
native spheres: were all spiritual truth granted, she would need
do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the
wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would
flood into the minds of her hearers. But now she must labor
difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory
by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce. So the
Vedas tell us