The whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many
words unnecessary. English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom
never perspired. Though the sentences open as we read them,
unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of
a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom
which could only have been learned from the most trivial
experience; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth
which subsides to the bottom of the ocean. They are clean and
dry as fossil truths, which have been exposed to the elements for
thousands of years, so impersonally and scientifically true that
they are the ornament of the parlor and the cabinet. Any _moral_
philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our
privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and,
at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is
spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days. As our domestic fowls are
said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our
domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her
philosophers.
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