(_γγ_) If, however, a national Epos is to secure in addition the permanent interest of foreign nations the world which it depicts must not merely be of a _particular_ nationality, but of a type that is, in this specific folk, its heroism and exploits, equally impressed with the stamp of our common humanity. In the poems of Homer, for example, the superb directness with which he deals with matters of divine or ethical import, the nobility of the characters and of everything living therein embraced, the pictorial quality of their presentment to the reader, all this insures an undying truth for succeeding ages. In this respect we find a remarkable contrast in the creation of different peoples. We cannot deny, for instance, that the Ramajana reflects with the essential directness of life the national spirit of the Hindoos, more particularly from the religious point of view; but the character of the entire Hindoo race is so overpoweringly of a unique type, that the essential features of our common humanity are unable to assert themselves through the veil of this national idiosyncracy. A remarkable contrast to this is the way in which the entire Christian world, from the earliest times, has found itself at home in those epic passages of Old Testament narrative, above all in the pictures of the patriarchal state, and able to repicture for itself to the life the events portrayed over and over again with the greatest enjoyment. The testimony of Goethe is unequivocal. Here was the _one_ focal centre, he assures us, on which, in his young days, amid much that he learned of a miscellaneous and unconnected character, his intellect no less than feeling concentrated itself. Even in later life he still remarks upon them that "after all our wanderings through the East we always returned in the end to these writings as the most invigorating spring of waters: here and there they might be troubled; not unfrequently they hid themselves in the earth; but it was only to rise up again pure and fresh as ever."