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Indian Idylls From the Sanskrit of the Mahâbhârata
Indian Idylls From the Sanskrit of the Mahbhrata Author:Sir Edwin Arnold General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Trübner Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / Anthologies Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Religion / Hinduism / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typo... more »s or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PREFACE. Sometime ago I wrote and published, in a paper entitled " The Iliad and Odyssey of India," the following passages: -- "There exist two colossal, two unparalleled epic poems in the sacred language of India -- the Mahabharata and the Eamayana -- which were not known to Europe, even by name, till Sir William Jones announced their existence ; and one of which (the larger) since his time has been made public only by fragments, by mere specimens, bearing to those vast treasures of Sanskrit literature such small proportion as cabinet samples of ore have to the riches of a silver mine. Yet these most remarkable poems contain almost all the history ofancient India, so far as it can be recovered; together with such inexhaustible details of its political, social, and religious life, that the antique Hindoo world really stands epitomised in them. The Old Testament is not more interwoven with the Jewish race, nor the New Testament with the civilization of Christendom, nor the Koran with the records and destinies of Islam, than these two Sanskrit poems with that unchanging and teeming population which Her Majesty rules as Empress of Hindostan. The stories, songs, and ballads; the histories and genealogies ; the nursery tales and religious discourses ; the art, the learning, the philosophy, the creeds, the moralities, the modes of thought, the very phrases, sayings, turns of expression, and daily ideas of the Hindoo people, are taken from these poem...« less