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OF THE HINDUS.
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tions in the spoken languages. These are mostly songs and hymns addressed to Vishnu, Krislina or Rádhá, tales and legends of individuals celebrated amongst them as saints, always marvellous, mostly absurd, and not infrequently immoral, and vague and dogmatical expositions of elements of belief, which, although in some degree discoverable in the Puranas, have assuned a novel and portentous prominence in the doctrines of the Vaishnava teachers and the practices of the people. These elements are passionate devotion and all-sufficient faith.
Whatever may have been the mistaken veneration entertained by the early Hindus for personified elements and attributes, or even for deified mortals, the language of invocation and prayer, though reverential, is calm and unimpassioned. The hymns of modern fanatics are composed in a very different strain, and breathe a glowing fervour of devotion which might almost be mistaken for sensual love. Something of this may have been borrowed from the Mohammedans, amongst whom the Súfís have always employed the language of earthly rapture, to describe the yearnings of the human soul, to be reunited with that divine spirit from which it is supposed to have originally proceeded. "Oh! the bliss of that day," says a Persian mystie, “when I shall depart from this desolate mansion, shall seek rest for my soul, and shall follow the traces of my beloved." They possibly derived their notions from one branch of the Hindu philosophy, the Vedanta; but they pursued the figure
