and Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire, the Winds and Waters.  Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of Eternal Beauty.  It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as some folk do, a ‘primitive’ state of society; we have not the keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people among whom those hymns arose.  Poetry in every succeeding age has had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her native spheres:  were all spiritual truth granted, she would need do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would flood into the minds of her hearers.  But now she must labor difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce.  So the Vedas tell us little unless we separate ourselves from our preconceptions about ‘primitive Aryans’; whose civilization may have been at once highly evolved and very spiritual.

The Brahmanas are priest-books; the Upanishads, it is reasonable to say are Kshattriya-books;—­you often find in them Brahmans coming to Kshattriyas to learn the Inner Wisdom.  The Brahmanas are books of ritual; the Upanishads came much later that the Brahmanas: that they represent a reaction towards spirituality from the tyranny of a priestly caste.  But probably the day of the Kshattriyas was much earlier than that of the priests.  The Marlow-Shakespear-Milton time was the Kshattriya period in English poetry; also the period during which the greatest souls incarnated, and produced the greatest work.  So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-classical Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure,—­a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the wonder and freeddom of their being.  Think, perhaps, as the cycle mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving:  mighty egos incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the Upanishads: there may have been a descent towards matter, to call forth these more explicit declarations of the Spirit.  The exclusive caste-system had not been evolved by any means, nor was to be for many ages:  the kings are at the head of things; and they, not the priests, the chief custodians of the Deeper Wisdom.—­And then, later, the Priest-cast made its contribution, evolving in the Brahmanas the ritual of their order; with an implication, ever growing after the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, that only by this ritual salvation could be attained.  Not that it follows that this was the idea at first.  Ritual has its place:  hymns and chantings, so they be the right ones, performed rightly, have their decided magical value; we can understand that in its inception and first purity, this Brahmana literature may have been a growth or birth, under the aegis of Alawn of the Harmonies, of the magic of chanted song.