Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/443

 V.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 407 educational institutions of Mithila, and Nadia in comparatively recent times, have held up a torch which has lit up the Hindu world and led it along the path of intellectual and spiritual progress. Here in Eastern India, sang Valmiki, that master of epics, the deep pathos of whose sublime poetry flows like the noble stream of the Tamasg itself on whose banks it was first composed. Of the Ramayana it has been said ;—‘‘So long as the mountains of the world endure and so long as noble rivers flow, this epic will be read.” The Aryans who came to Bengal and settled The Sie ও ই : : : apostles of here had distinctly a high religious object in view. Bengal. From (ila Bhadra, Dipankara and Mahavira to Minanath, Goraksanath, Hadipa, Kalupa, Chau- rangee and even Ramai Pandit—the apostles of Bengal all proclaimed to the people the transitori- ness of this world and the glory of a religious life. I have referred to the whole of Eastern India, because Bengali civilization four hundred years ago was the result of all these influences combined. The environment of a man shapes his proclivities to a great extent and the Bengal of the 16th century was pre-eminently marked by the influ- ences that had governed Eastern India for ages. Nadia-Tolas, represented a revival, not indeed on such a wide scale yet in a subtler way, of the learning of the Nalanda monasteries. Buddha had taught kindness to animals and a process of intros- pection by which a conquest over the warring pas- sions of the soul might be gained. Peace was pro- claimed, not only with the human, but also with the animal world, and when the soil was so far pre-