Still Had
India, And That Old Noontide Philosophy, The Better Part Of Our
Thoughts.
It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense
in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a playful
wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees
itself.
It asserts their health and independence of the
experience of later times. This pledge of sanity cannot be
spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon
itself. The story and fabulous portion of this book winds
loosely from sentence to sentence as so many oases in a desert,
and is as indistinct as a camel's track between Mourzouk and
Darfour. It is a comment on the flow and freshet of modern
books. The reader leaps from sentence to sentence, as from one
stepping-stone to another, while the stream of the story rushes
past unregarded. The Bhagvat-Geeta is less sententious and
poetic, perhaps, but still more wonderfully sustained and
developed. Its sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds
even of soldiers and merchants. It is the characteristic of
great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion
to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they
will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the
traveller may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks
at a full stream.
One of the most attractive of those ancient books that I have met
with is the Laws of Menu.
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