Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/926

 882 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITRRATURE. [ Chap. of home life—reaching the loftiest range in the conception of the Nirguna. Nothing strikes a man so greatly as his contact with a person who possesses qualities other than his own, and the Bengalis are a race who owing to their keen intellectual powers can at once enter upon a new field, as soon as it is presented to them. European hand-books and manuals took them by surprise. They disclosed a world to them of which they knew nothing. They saw in the civili- ~ sation of Europe a success and acquisition of power which struck them with wonder and they became willing disciples of the new teachers. In the pas- sionate sincerity of our race to acquire new know- ledge, they forgot their home, their literature, their wonderful success in metaphysical learning, and their great spirituality, and felt that they were dwarfed in the presence of that great materialistic civilisation which, armed with thunder and lightning and with the tremendous power of steam, stood knocking at their door—demanding audience. Young Bengal, as the new generation of the Bengalis were then called, became thoroughly anglicised in spirit. They exulted in Shakespeare’s dramas and Milton’s poetry; they read Schil- 10175 Robbers and Goethe’s Faust; they could name all the English dramatists of the Elezabethan ৬ age— Marlow, Philip Massinger, Ford, John Webs- eee ter, Ben Johnson and Shirley and reproduce from memory lines from still earlier dramatists and from Holinshed’s chronicles which Shakespeare had im- proved on, in many a noble line. They grew mad « after Shelley’s Epipsychidion, Keat’s Hyperion and