Ancient India: Its Language and Religions

There could have been no more receptive soil than Germany at that time, which was full of spirited interest in the ancient national poetry of all nations. It was also occupied with the stirring movements then active in its own philosophy and literature. Apparently, German philosophy and literature were closely allied to the spirit of distant Hindu literature; for here, too, oriental romanticism and poetical thought sought to penetrate to the primal and formless source of all things, just as boldly as the absolute philosophy of Germany did. From the beginning, poets stood in the foremost ranks among the German Sanskrit scholars original: "Sanskritists"; these included the two Schlegels August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, key figures in the German Romantic movement and Friedrich Rückert. Beside these, careful and unassuming, was the great founder of grammatical science, Franz Bopp.

In the year 1808, Friedrich Schlegel’s work appeared: About the Language and Wisdom of the Indians original: Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (The Language and Learning of the Hindus). Based on what he knew of Hindu poetry and speculation, and following his own ideas about the laws and goals of the human mind, Schlegel used warm and imaginative eloquence to draw a picture of India as a land of noble, primitive wisdom. He described Hindu religion and Hindu poetry as being full of exuberant power and light; in comparison, he felt even the noblest philosophy and poetry of Greece was only a faint spark. The era from which the Hindu masterpieces originated appeared to him as a distant, gigantic, ancient age of spiritual culture. It was the home of those solemn teachings, full of somber tragedy, regarding the migration of the soul and the dark fate which determines the paths and the ends of all beings:

Obedient to this established purpose, they wander from God to plants;
Here, in the abhorred world of existence, which moves forever toward destruction.

While Schlegel gave the world this imaginative...