And my Lord said—" Return ye to the band At sight, I deem so, of the shadow here I never saw a meteor dart so quick Through the serene at midnight, or a gleam Back like an unreined troop towards us they sped. "O soul who travellest, with the very frame Which thou wert born with, to thy blessed end, Stay thy step somewhat! "-crying thus they came. "Look if among us any thou dost know, That thou of him to earth mayst tidings bear. Stay-wilt thou not? ah! wherefore must thou go? We to our dying hour were sinners there : And all were slain: but at the murderous blow, Contrite, forgiving, and by Him forgiven To look on Whom such longing yearns our heart." To give you comfort, speak, and I will do; JACOPO DI FANO. "Without such protestation," one replied, In thy kind offices we all confide; Whence I, sole speaking before these, entreat If thou mayst e'er the territory see That lies betwixt Romagna and the seat* Where Charles hath sway, that thou so courteous be To put up prayers there earnestly for me That I may purge the sins that weigh me down. The Marquisate or March of Ancona was then governed by Charles of Valois, who held Naples. There I was born; but those deep wounds of mine Where most secure my person I believed: Towards Mira, still where breath is I might wait. And there, entangled in the cany brake BUONCONTE DI MONTEFELTRO. Here spake another: "O may that desire Giovanna cares not, no one cares for me; And I to him: "What violence took thee, So far that none e'er knew thy burial-place ?" There, where that name is lost in Arno's flood, Exhausted I arrived, footsore and galled, Pierced in my throat, painting the plain with blood. Here my sight failed me and I fell the last Word that I spake was Mary's name, and then From my deserted flesh the spirit passed. The truth I tell now, tell to living men ; God's Angel took me, but that fiend of Hell Screamed out: Ha! thou from heaven, why robb'st thou me? That is; in the territory of Padua, founded, as the student will remember, by the Trojan Antenor, whose tomb is shown in Padua to this day. That is in Milton's Vall'ombrosa. VOL. XVI.-21 From Pratomagno far as the great chain,* So that the o'erburdened air to water turned: Swelled with the superflux the soaked earth spurned. Of holy cross with my crossed arms: in fine, PIA DE' TOLOMMEI. "O stay! when thou shalt walk the world once more, "Remember Pia! for that name was mine: Sienna gave me birth: Maremma's fen Was my undoing: he knows that full well Far as to the upper Apennines. SANSKRIT AND THE VEDAS.* "But in justice, I am bound to say that Rome has the merit of having first seriously attended to the study of Indian literature."-CARDINAL WISEMAN: Connection between Science and Revealed Religion. "The first missionaries who succeeded in rousing the attention of European scholars to the extraordinary discovery (Sanskrit literature) that had been made were the French Jesuit missionaries."-MAX MULLER: Lectures on the Science of Language. WHAT manner of language is the be as ancient a tongue as is repreSanskrit ? sented that neither in Greek, RoBy what people or nation was it man, nor, indeed, in any ancient litspoken ? When? and where? What are its literary monuments? * Oriental and Linguistic Studies. The Veda; The Avesta: The Science of Language. By William Dwight Whitney, Prof. of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale College. One vol. 8vo, 416 pp. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1873. erature, is it ever mentioned, and that we only read of it in modern works, scarce a century old? Such questions as these are frequently asked, even at the present day. Forty years ago, it is doubtful if there were ten persons in this country able to reply to them satisfactorily, and more than doubtful if a single scholar could have been found capable of translating the simplest Sanskrit sentence. Within that period, however, philological science in general, and Sanskrit in particular, have made long and rapid strides among us, and we now have scores of scholars fully awake to the importance of cultivating the resources of this wonderful tongue, as the origin or common source of the European family of languages, in which our own English is included. At the head of these scholars stands, without dispute, Prof. William Dwight Whitney, whose linguistic acquirements and philosophical treatment of difficult philological problems have earned for him a very high and well-merited reputation. Nor is this opinion a merely patriotic and partial estimate. Prof. Whitney's merits as a Sanskrit scholar and comparative philologist are fully acknowledged, not only in this country, but by the eminent Orientalists of Europe. The first periodical of Germany and of the world for the comparative study of languages (Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen, Berlin, 1872), in a late number recognizes, in the most flattering manner, Prof. Whitney's high rank in the philological republic of letters, and refers in complimentary terms to the fact that he is well known in Germany as the editor of the Sanskrit text of the Atharva Veda. We may here incidentally note, in the same number of the Zeitschrift, another gratifying recognition of advanced American scholarship. We refer to a review of Prof. March's Comparative Grammar of the AngloSaxon, from the pen of Moritz Heyne, the well-known author of the Brief Comparative Grammar of the Old German Dialects, and editor of the celebrated editions of the MosoGothic Bible of Ulphilas, and of the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf. The German reviewer credits Prof. March's work with extensive and original investigation, great erudition in the Anglo-Saxon texts, and valuable contributions to the grammar of the language. He adds, that the study of Anglo-Saxon is pursued with more zeal and success in the United States than in England. Solid commendation like this, from such a source, speaks well for American progress in the field of philological science. During the past twenty years, Prof. Whitney has published numerous essays on Sanskrit literature which, limited to the special circulation of scientific or literary periodicals, have not fallen under the notice of the general reading public. Many of these articles he has now collected. and published in a volume,* edited by himself. Four of the essays are on the Vedas and Vedic literature, one on the Avesta (commonly called the Zend-Avesta), and seven upon yarious philological topics, including two reviews of Max Müller's Lectures on Language, which are admirable specimens of temperate and careful criticism, guided by sound scholarship. Prof. Whitney's first paper on the Vedas (originally published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iii., 1853) opens thus: "It is a truth now well established, that the Vedas furnish the only sure foundation on which a knowledge of ancient and modern India can be built up. They are therefore at present engrossing the larger share of the attention of those who pursue this branch of Ori ental study. Only recently, however, has their paramount importance been fully recognized: it was by slow degrees that Title of the work given at head of this article. they made their way up to the consideration in which they are now held. Once it was questioned whether any such books as the Vedas really existed, or whether, if they did exist, the jealous care of the Brahmans would ever allow them to be laid open to European eyes. This doubt dispelled, they were first introduced to the near acquaintance of scholars in the West by Colebrooke." Not stopping to raise a question as to just reclamation in favor of Sir William Jones for a portion at least of the credit of the introduction of the Vedas to the "acquaintance of scholars in the West," which, perhaps Professor Whitney means to solve in advance by a distinction between acquaintance and "near acquaintance," we would observe that this comprehensive statement as to the introduction of the Vedas to European scholars takes for granted the previous interesting history of the modern discovery of the existence of the Sanskrit and of Vedic literature. We use the expression "takes for granted" in no invidious sense. The author was writing for scholars who, he had a right to assume, were already acquainted with the objective history of his subject-matter, and were probably informed as to the details of the gradual steps by which the certainty of the existence of a great language and a rich literature long buried in darkness was at length brought to light. His concern was with the internal, not the external, history of Sanskrit. Now, it is upon this external history that we propose to say something, returning to Prof. Whitney's work when we reach the subject of the Vedas. It is not necessary that our readers should, to any extent, be linguists or philologists in order to become. deeply interested in the relation of the modern discovery of a language so old that it had ceased to be spoken and was a dead language hun dreds of years before the Christian era a language to which cannot with any certainty be assigned the name of the nation or people who spoke it, and which is at once the most ancient of all known tongues, living or dead, and, despite all modern research, still prehistoric. To our Catholic readers, the narration of this discovery is full of inte rest; for in it they will recognize an additional version of the familiar story of the enlightened intelligence, piety, and self-sacrifice of our devoted missionaries who, combining active zeal for knowledge with apostolic zeal for souls, amid privation and suffering, even in distant and savage lands, with one hand built up the walls of Zion, while with the other they erected temples to science. In order fully to appreciate the bearing and importance of the revelation of Sanskrit to Europe, it is essential that we should first look a moment upon the condition of European comparative philology at the end of the XVIth and commencement of the XVIIth centuries. A short digression will suffice for this. The Hebrew language was, from the earliest period of Christianity, settled upon by almost common consent of the learned as the primitive tongue. It was generally admitted by scholars that the sole great essential linguistic problem to be solved was this: and ther of all languages, how are we to ex "As Hebrew is undoubtedly the mo plain the process by which Hebrew became split into so many dialects, and how can these numerous dialects, such as Greek and Latin, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, be traced back to their common source, the Hebrew?" Upon this hopelessly insoluble problem an amazing amount of remarkable ingenuity and solid erudition were, for hundreds of years, |