I would say to the readers of Scriptures, if they wish for a good book, read the Bhagvat-Geeta, an episode to the Mahabharat, said to have been written by Kreeshna Dwypayen Veias,—­known to have been written by——­, more than four thousand years ago,—­it matters not whether three or four, or when,—­translated by Charles Wilkins.  It deserves to be read with reverence even by Yankees, as a part of the sacred writings of a devout people; and the intelligent Hebrew will rejoice to find in it a moral grandeur and sublimity akin to those of his own Scriptures.

To an American reader, who, by the advantage of his position, can see over that strip of Atlantic coast to Asia and the Pacific, who, as it were, sees the shore slope upward over the Alps to the Himmaleh Mountains, the comparatively recent literature of Europe often appears partial and clannish, and, notwithstanding the limited range of his own sympathies and studies, the European writer who presumes that he is speaking for the world, is perceived by him to speak only for that corner of it which he inhabits.  One of the rarest of England’s scholars and critics, in his classification of the worthies of the world, betrays the narrowness of his European culture and the exclusiveness of his reading.  None of her children has done justice to the poets and philosophers of Persia or of India.  They have even been better known to her merchant scholars than to her poets and thinkers by profession.  You may look in vain through English poetry for a single memorable verse inspired by these themes.  Nor is Germany to be excepted, though her philological industry is indirectly serving the cause of philosophy and poetry.  Even Goethe wanted that universality of genius which could have appreciated the philosophy of India, if he had more nearly approached it.  His genius was more practical, dwelling much more in the regions of the understanding, and was less native to contemplation than the genius of those sages.  It is remarkable that Homer and a few Hebrews are the most Oriental names which modern Europe, whose literature has taken its rise since the decline of the Persian, has admitted into her list of Worthies, and perhaps the worthiest of mankind, and the fathers of modern thinking,—­for the contemplations of those Indian sages have influenced, and still influence, the intellectual development of mankind,—­whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are, for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed.  If the lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise.  In every one’s youthful dreams philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world.  In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.  Beside the vast and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, even our Shakespeare seems sometimes