Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/26

Rh record is found in her industrial development. The transfer of government from the old Hindu centre of Vikrampur to the Mohammedan capitals of Dacca and Murshidabad, meant, in its turn, great changes in the direction of arts and crafts. It would be marked by new tendencies in the matter of taste, the old artistic power exerting itself to meet new standards. We must accustom ourselves to the psychological analysis of ornament and the historical and geographical placing of works of art, in order to understand the immense influence of great political events upon private life and interests. Architecture, music, and poetry are things higher than the concrete industrial crafts of home and household life, yet marked, no less surely, with the era to which they belong. By learning to refer everything to its own time and to the state of mind that gave it birth, we build up in ourselves a wonderful readiness for the graver and more serious aspects of history. We learn too that lesson which botanists, zoologists, and geologists 'have had during the last century to learn and teach, namely, that things which are found together may have taken wide distances of space and time to produce. The poems of Vidyapati and Ram Mohun Roy may stand side by side in our hymn-books, but what travail of the human spirit lies between the making of the two! In ages of normal growth a new mode, in building, or graving, or thinking, is born but slowly, and goes much deeper than we can