"Darkly shining Dusk, thy sister, has sought her abiding, Fear not to trouble her dreams; daughters, ye twain of the Sun, Dusk and dawn bringing birth! O Sisters! your path is unending; Dead are the first who have watched; when shall our waking be done? "Bright, luminous Dawn; rose-red, radiant, rejoicing! Shew the traveller his road; the cattle their pastures new; Rouse the beasts of the Earth to their truthful myriad voicing, Leader of rightful days! softening the soil with dew. "Wide-expanded Dawn! Open the gates of the morning; Waken the singing birds! Guide thou the truthful light To uttermost shade of the shadow, for--see you! the dawning Is born, white-shining, out of the gloom of the night." Surely there is something in these phrases, taken truthfully from the original and strung together consecutively so as to give the spirit which animates the whole, that makes us of these later times feel closely akin to those who sang thus in the Dawn of Days. THE DAYS OF THE EPICS ABOUT B.C. 1400 TO ABOUT B.C. 1000 The area of India which has now to be considered is much larger. Oudh, Northern Behar, and the country about Benares are comprised in it; but Southern India remains as ever, unknown, even if existent. The sources of information concerning this period of six hundred years are also much larger, though in a measure less trustworthy; for the two great epics of India, the Mâhâbhârata and the Râmâyana, are avowedly imaginative, and not--as are the hymns of the Rig-Veda--the outcome of the daily life of a people, which, like the accretions of a coral reef, remain to show what manner of creature once lived in them. Even the remaining Vedas, the Yajur, the Sâma and the Athârva, partake of the same purely literary spirit, although the first and second of these were probably in existence towards the end of the Vedic period. The last named is--at least in its recognition as a Sacred Text--of far later date. All three consist largely of transcripts from the Rig-Veda, and around each of them, as indeed around the Rig-Veda-Sanhita itself, there grew up a subsidiary literature called Brahmânas, the object of which was to explain, consolidate, and elaborate both the ritual and teaching of the Vedic age, as it became archaic under the pressure of a greater complexity in life.