instance, the Mahábhárata; or of the farther spread of Brahmanism towards the south, as, for instance, the Rámáyaṇa. If we connect with this the first fairly accurate information about India which we have from a Greek source, viz., from Megasthenes,[1] it becomes clear that at the time of this writer the Brahmanising of Hindustán was already completed, while at the time of the Periplus (see Lassen, I. AK., ii. 150, n; I. St., ii. 192) the very southern-most point of the Dekhan had already become the seat of the worship of the wife of Śiva. What a series of years, of centuries, must necessarily have elapsed before this boundless tract of country, inhabited by wild and vigorous tribes, could have been brought over to Brahmanism!”
I must beg my European readers not to expect to find in these hymns and songs the sublime poetry that they meet with in Isaiah or Job, or the Psalms of David. ”To me,” says Professor Wilson, ”the verses of the Veda, except in their rhythm, and in a few rare passages, appear singularly prosaic for so early an era as that of their probable composition, and at any rate their chief value lies not in their fancy but in their facts, social and religious.” Professor Cowell, also, says: ”The poetry of the Ṛig-Veda is singularly deficient in that simplicity and natural pathos or sublimity which we naturally look for in the songs of an early period of civilisation. The language and style of most of the hymns is singularly artificial......Occasionally we meet with fine outbursts of poetry, especially in the hymns addressed to the dawn, but these are never long sustained, and as a rule we find few grand similes or metaphors.” The worst fault of all, in the Collection regarded as a whole, is the intolerable monotony of a great number of the hymns, a monotony which reaches its climax in the ninth Book which consists almost entirely of invocations of Soma Pavamâna, or the deified Soma juice in process of straining and purification.
- ↑ Who as ambassador of Seleucus resided for some time at the court of Chandragupta. His reports are preserved to us chiefly in the Ίνδικά of Arrian who lived in the second century A. D.
