said to have possessed quite; and Han literature was probably its first culmination under Han Wuti, and its second under the Eastern Hans.  One suspects that great creation is generally going on somewhere, and is not displeased to find hints of its presence in India; is inclined to think this may have been, after all, the Golden Age of the Sanskrit Drama.—­At which there can be at any rate no harm in taking a glance at this point; and, retrospectively, at Sanskrit literature as a whole;—­a desperately inadequate glance, be it said.

I ask you here to remember the three periods of English Poetry, with their characteristics; and you must not mind my using my Welsh god-names in connexion with them.  First, then, there was the Period of Plenydd,—­of the beginnings of Vision; when the eyes of Chaucer and his lyricist predecessors were opened to the world out-of-doors; when they began to see that the skies were blue, fields and forests green; that there were flowers in the meadows and woodlands; and that all these things were delectable.  Then there was the Period of Gwron, Strength; when Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton evolved the Grand Manner; when they made the great March-Music, unknown in English before, and hardly achieved by anyone since:—­the era of the great Warrior-poetry of the Tragedies and of Paradise Lost. Then came, with Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the Age of Alawn, lasting on until today; when the music of intonation brought with it romance and mystery and Natural Magic with its rich glow and wizard insight.  And you will remember how English Poetry, on the uptrend of a major cycle, is a reaching from the material towards the spiritual, a growth toward that.  Though Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,—­by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,—­you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise; nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth’s.  There was an evolution upward and inward; from Chaucer’s school-boy vision, to Swinburne’s (in that one book) clear sight of the Soul.

We appear to find in Sanskrit literature,—­I speak in a very general sense,—­also such great main epochs or cycles.  First a reign of Plenydd, of Vision,—­in the Age of the Sacred Books.  Then a reign of Gwron,—­in the Age of the heroic Epics.  Then a reign of Alawn, in the Age of the Drama.

But the direction is all opposite.  The cycle is not upward, from the sough of a beastly Iron Age towards the luminance of a coming Golden; but downward from the peaks and splendors of the Age of Gold to where the outlook is on to this latter hell’s-gulf of years.  Plenydd, when he first touched English eyes, he was Plenydd the Lord of Spiritual vision, the Seer into the Eternities.  Wordsworth at his highest only approaches,—­ Swinburne in Hertha halts at the portals of, the Upanishads.