and absorption in Brahm. To this end are directed the sacrifices, the
prayers, the ablutions, the pilgrimages, and the penances, which occupy so
large a place in the Hindu worship.

3. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LITERATURE AND ITS DIVISIONS.--A greater part of
the Sanskrit literature, which counts its works by thousands, still
remains in manuscript. It was nearly all composed in metre, even works of
law, morality, and science. Every department of knowledge and every branch
of inquiry is represented, with the single exception of history, and this
forms the most striking general characteristic of the literature, and one
which robs it of a great share of worth and interest. Its place is in the
intellectual rather than in the political history of the world.

The literary monuments of the Sanskrit language correspond to the great
eras in the history of India. The first period reaches back to that remote
age, when those tribes of the Aryan race speaking Sanskrit emigrated to
the northwestern portion of the Indian Peninsula, and established
themselves there, an agricultural and pastoral people. That was the age in
which were composed the prayers, hymns, and precepts afterwards collected
in the form of the Vedas, the sacred books of the country. In the second
period, the people, incited by the desire of conquest, penetrated into the
fertile valleys lying between the Indus and the Ganges; and the struggle
with the aboriginal inhabitants, which followed their invasion, gave birth
to epic poetry, in which the wars of the different races were celebrated
and the extension of Hindu civilization related. The third period embraces
the successive ages of the formation and development of a learned and
artistic literature. It contains collections of the ancient traditions,
expositions of the Vedas, works on grammar, lexicography, and science; and
its conclusion forms the golden age of Sanskrit literature, when, the
country being ruled by liberal princes, poetry, and especially the drama,