I Know Of No Book Which Has Come Down To Us With Grander
Pretensions Than This, And It Is So Impersonal And Sincere That
It Is Never Offensive Nor Ridiculous.
Compare the modes in which
modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book,
and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it
expects.
It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit,
with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you
cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the
table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of
the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as superior to
criticism as the Himmaleh Mountains. Its tone is of such
unrelaxed fibre, that even at this late day, unworn by time, it
wears the English and the Sanscrit dress indifferently; and its
fixed sentences keep up their distant fires still, like the
stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined.
The whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many
words unnecessary. English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom
never perspired. Though the sentences open as we read them,
unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of
a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom
which could only have been learned from the most trivial
experience; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth
which subsides to the bottom of the ocean. They are clean and
dry as fossil truths, which have been exposed to the elements for
thousands of years, so impersonally and scientifically true that
they are the ornament of the parlor and the cabinet.
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