I shall endeavour, therefore, as far as this is possible within the limits of one Lecture, to answer some of these questions, and to remove some of these doubts, by explaining to you, first, what the Veda really is, and, secondly, what importance it possesses, not only to the people of India, but to ourselves in Europe,--and here again, not only to the student of Oriental languages, but to every student of history, religion, or philosophy; to every man who has once felt the charm of tracing that mighty stream of human thought on which we ourselves are floating onward, back to its distant mountain-sources; to every one who has a heart for whatever has once filled the hearts of millions of human beings with their noblest hopes, and fears, and aspirations;--to every student of mankind in the fullest sense of that full and weighty word. Whoever claims that noble title must not forget, whether he examines the highest achievements of mankind in our own age, or the miserable failures of former ages, what man is, and in whose image and after whose likeness man was made. Whether listening to the shrieks of the Shaman sorcerers of Tatary, or to the odes of Pindar, or to the sacred songs of Paul Gerhard: whether looking at the pagodas of China, or the Parthenon of Athens, or the cathedral of Cologne: whether reading the sacred books of the Buddhists, of the Jews, or of those who worship God in spirit and in truth, we ought to be able to say, like the Emperor Maximilian, 'Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,' or, translating his words somewhat freely, 'I am a man, nothing pertaining to man I deem foreign to myself.' Yes, we must learn to read in the history of the whole human race something of our own history; and as in looking back on the story of our own life, we all dwell with a peculiar delight on the earliest chapters of our childhood, and try to find there the key to many of the riddles of our later life, it is but natural that the historian, too, should ponder with most intense interest over the few relics that have been preserved to him of the childhood of the human race. These relics are few indeed, and therefore very precious, and this I may venture to say, at the outset and without fear of contradiction, that there exists no literary relic that carries us back to a more primitive, or, if you like, more child-like state in the history of man[9] than the Veda. As the language of the Veda, the Sanskrit, is the most ancient type of the English of the present day, (Sanskrit and English are but varieties of one and the same language,) so its thoughts and feelings contain in reality the first roots and germs of that intellectual growth which by an unbroken chain connects our own generation with the ancestors of the Aryan race,--with those very people who at the rising and setting of the sun listened with trembling hearts to the songs of the Veda, that told them of bright powers above, and of a life to come