সবুজ পত্র state, sort lies in the realisation of the truth that the human soul is one with the divine. He who realises the God in him is the only free man, and as such is above all social rules. The paradox that man is socially bound but spiritually free, dominated the classical mind of India; and the tragedy of Indian history consists in this utter divorce of life from thought. This Vedic literature was a sealed book to the masses, the real people of India, and was open only to the ruling race, the Aryan conquerors, of whose genius it was the product. What really formed, or transformed, the psychology of the people at large, was the story of the lives of the Aryans of the heroic age, recorded in the two great epics of Indin, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These are tales of heroic deeds and noble endeavours, and the outstand- ing feature of the epic characters is their moral grandeur. These two epics also happen to be the un- failing source of all subsequent Sanskrit literature. Generation after generation of poets, dramatists, and story-tellers have drawn both their inspiration and their material from them. It is not necessary for me to dwell at length on later Sanskrit literature, be- cause, in spite of all its high excellence, it has had little or no influence on either the form or the spirit of our modern literature. It could not influence life, because it was too far removed from life. We admire
