And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that to attribute these three branches of literature to a single manvantara is a woeful foreshortening.  I suppose the Rig-Veda is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.

The Upanishads affect us like poetry; even in Max Muller’s translation, which is poor prose, they do not lose altogether their uplift and quality of song.  They sing the philosophy of the divine in Man; I suppose we may easily say they are the highest thing in extant literature.  They do not come to us whole or untainted.  We may remember what the Swami Dayanand Sarasvati said to H. P. Blavatsky:  that he could show the excellent “Moksh Mooller” that “what crossed the Kalapani from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books.”  Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching; the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books.  Also the Buddha was a Kshattriya; so the ancient eminence of the Kshattriyas had to be obscured a little;—­it was the Brahmans, by that time, who were monopolizing the teaching office.  And no doubt in the same way from time to time much has been added:  the Brahmans could do this, being custodians of the sacred literature.  Yet in spite of all we get in them a lark’s song,—­ but a spiritual lark’s song, floating and running in the golden glories of the Spiritual Sun; a song whose verve carries us openly up into the realms of pure spirit; a wonderful radiance and sweetness of dawn, of dawn in its fresh purity, its holiness,—­haunted with no levity or boisterousness of youth, but with a wisdom gay and ancient,—­eternal, laughter-laden, triumphant,—­at once hoary and young,—­like the sparkle of snows on Himalaya, like the amber glow in the eastern sky.  Here almost alone in literature we get long draughts of the Golden Age:  not a Golden Age fought for and brought down into our perceptions (which all true poetry gives us), but one actually existing, open and free;—­and not merely the color and atmosphere of it, but the wisdom.  One need not wonder that Madame Blavatsky drew so freely on India for the nexus of her teachings.  That country has performed a marvelous function, taking all its ages together, in the life of humanity; in preserving for us the poetry and wisdom of an age before the Mysteries had declined; in keeping open for us, in a semi-accessible literature, a kind of window into the Golden Age.—­Well; each of the races has some function to fulfil.  And it is not modern India that has done this; she has not done it of her own good will,—­has had no good will to do it.  It is the Akbars the Anquetil Duperrons and Sir William Joneses, —­and above all, and far above all, H. P. Blavatsky,—­whom we have to thank.