Ye clouds that gorgeously repose Around the setting sun, Answer! have ye a home for those The bright clouds answered: We depart, Ask what is deathless in the heart For that which cannot die! Speak then, thou voice of God within! Answer me, through life's restless din, And the voice answered: Be thou still! Enough to know is given; Clouds, winds, and stars their task fulfil, Thine is to trust to heaven! In Felicia Hemans we have an instance of a highly gifted woman who, amidst many difficulties of domestic life, and with few advantages, used her poetical powers with artistic devotion and for the noblest ends. The manner in which she was able to introduce us into the scenes described in foreign lands was remarkable, seeing that she never left her native country. It was only from her wide reading of Spanish and German literature that her powerful imagination drew the pictures she so vividly paints for us. All her life she conscientiously cultivated her mind to render it a fitting medium for her poetry. Endowed by nature with a marvellous facility for the writing of verse, she did not allow herself to be betrayed into careless writing, but in all her poems she clearly expresses her meaning in finished and harmonious lines. She had a musical ear, and a fine eye for colour, which qualities are displayed in every poem she wrote. She was not endowed with the vigour of mind or the subtlety of thought shown by some of her contemporaries, but she was equal to the best of them in lyrical pieces, where her noble, womanly heart, stirring within her, fired her imagination. Her intense devotion to her art is shown by the number of her poems, which fill seven volumes of her collected works. Her memory is fragrant as of one "who uttered nothing base." In the words of a Liverpool Poet-Mr. Eastwood Here, sorrowing childhood finds relief, "The Homes of England" with the glow Of fireside love, the millions know, And mark in faith the lifted hand That points them to “The Better Land." * I cannot close this paper without expressing my regret that Liverpool has as yet made no effort to honour her memory. Mr. Mackenzie Bell endeavoured in 1893 to stir us to a sense of our duty in the matter, but without success. Could not we, as members of the oldest Literary Society in the city, do something in this direction? I venture to suggest the establishment, under the auspices of the Society, of a prize at University College for the best lyrical poem, to be awarded annually, bearing the name of Mrs. Hemans. * Fireside Poems, by J. R. Eastwood, 1896. HINDU MYTHOLOGY. BY ERNEST NEVINS, M.B., LOND. In order to understand the various Hindu deities, we must first glance at the broad changes that have taken place in them, as shown by the Hindu sacred books, the Vedas, the Puranas, and the Râmâyana. First come the four Vedas, which are above all things. holy, and were directly given by the great Eternal Spirit to his mind-born sons, the Rishis. They contain about 1,300 hymns, some beautiful, others of little merit, addressed to various forces of nature. Some of these were composed, though not written, before the old Aryans left the plains of Central Asia for India. It is impossible to fix their dates accurately, but they probably go back to days before Abraham, and some of the gods they praise were probably those from whom Abraham fled. The earliest were addressed to nature objects, which were not at first personified, such as Dyaus and Prithivi, the heaven and the earth, Ushas, the dawn, Surya, the sun, and so on. Gradually these various forces were personified as male and female deities, who, in course of time, were credited, or discredited, with the attributes of male and female human beings, and degeneration of the originally pure ideas rapidly spread. As time went on, the Vedic religion was modified by the various religions and superstitions with which it came in contact, and a great change came over the gods. Those who had been chief in the old Vedic days, namely, Agni, god of fire, Indra, god of rain, and Surya, god of the sun, went out of fashion, and a new triad new triad Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer, became supreme. Gradually men began to desire more personal gods, and the Brahmin teachers published (if one may use such a term) the Puránas, in which they described the more modern humanised gods, with their wives and their various incarnations. The next great change was that Brahma went out of fashion, and Vishnu and Siva received less and less worship in their original forms, whilst men turned their attention to the personal incarnations of Vishnu, and the emblem of the re-creative power of Siva, which are still the popular objects of adoration with the Hindus. At the base of all Brahminism and Hinduism is the great dogma, "There is but one being, no second." This being, or, as it might be called now-a-days, the "first cause," ," is called Brahm, which means "all pervading," or Narayana, which means "moving on the face of the waters." This first cause created the gods first, and, through their agency, demigods, demons, and worlds, but as to the various steps in the creation books do not agree. Unfortunately, the Vedic hymns exalt to supreme importance the god to whom the particular hymn is addressed, so that by one Varuna will be declared as first and greatest, and father of the world; whilst another will ascribe all these qualities to Surya, or any of the numerous personalities. In the same way each Purána exalts the particular member of the later triad to whom its author paid worship, so that it is very difficult to settle the relation of the various deities to each other. In the following descriptions of the deities, various accounts are blended to make the life-history as intelligible as possible in the short space of this paper. To begin with the creation. This is a difficult problem nowa-days, and even the divinely inspired Hindu writers found it a difficult nut to crack. However, they were not dismayed, but each gave his own account, and no two agree. The earliest account, from a hymn in the Rig Veda, is as follows: In the beginning there was neither nought nor aught; Then there was neither day nor night, nor light nor Only the Existent One breathed calmly, self-contained. In which the One lay void, shrouded in nothingness. From another hymn of the same Rig Veda, it appears that the result of his growth was a primal germ, what we might call the mighty atom, from which sprang a being, Purusha, really an embodied form of the one eternal essence. This Purusha was sacrificed, and produced all the worlds and their inhabitants, that is to say, the early Vedic divine triad, the earth, air, light, darkness, man, animals, and things; the Brahmin sprang from his mouth, the warrior from his arms, the trader from his thighs, and the servile castes from his feet. By Puranic times theories had become more developed, and each Purána gives its own account, said to be derived from divine inspiration. * Indian Wisdom, by Sir M. Williams. |