Here, Then, The Indians
Must Have Fished Before The Whites Arrived.
There was another
similar sandy tract about half a mile above this.
Still the noon prevailed, and we turned the prow aside to bathe,
and recline ourselves under some buttonwoods, by a ledge of
rocks, in a retired pasture sloping to the water's edge, and
skirted with pines and hazels, in the town of Hudson. 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. According to Sir William Jones,
"Vyasa, the son of Parasara, has decided that the Veda, with its
Angas, or the six compositions deduced from it, the revealed
system of medicine, the Puranas or sacred histories, and the code
of Menu, were four works of supreme authority, which ought never
to be shaken by arguments merely human." The last is believed by
the Hindoos "to have been promulged in the beginning of time, by
Menu, son or grandson of Brahma," and "first of created beings";
and Brahma is said to have "taught his laws to Menu in a hundred
thousand verses, which Menu explained to the primitive world in
the very words of the book now translated." Others affirm that
they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of
mortals, "while the gods of the lower heaven and the band of
celestial musicians are engaged in studying the primary
code." - "A number of glosses or comments on Menu were composed by
the Munis, or old philosophers, whose treatises, together with
that before us, constitute the Dherma Sastra, in a collective
sense, or Body of Law." Culluca Bhatta was one of the more modern
of these.
Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith
that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;
but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment
to the traveller, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan
or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing
of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not
sentenced to any caste.
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. Any _moral_
philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our
privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and,
at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is
spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days. As our domestic fowls are
said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our
domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her
philosophers. We are dabbling in the very elements of our
present conventional and actual life; as if it were the primeval
conventicle where how to eat, and to drink, and to sleep, and
maintain life with adequate dignity and sincerity, were the
questions to be decided. It is later and more intimate with us
even than the advice of our nearest friends.
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