Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/357

 volumes, but he had no hope of being able to do so, unless, as he humourously said "Government was pleased to send him back to Mandalay for another period of six years. "

Even the perfunctory and casual account he has given in the Arctic Home and the Gita-Rahasya, of the progress of the ancient Aryans in culture, shows that he was gifted with an imagination of a very high order; Mr. Tilak's imagination was rather the solid, strong and masculine imagination of a scientist or a philosopher than the poet's which like "a beautiful and ineffectual angel " beats " in the void, his luminous wings." His short but suggestive article on the "Indian and the Chaldean Vedas" strikes out a new line of investigation not only in comparative philology but in the history of ancient Asia as well. In this article, Mr. Tilak starts with a quotation from the Atharva-Veda wherein he finds several words that look unsanskrit in origin, traces them to the Chaldean Vedas and then gives his arguments regarding intercommunication between India and Chaldea.

Mr. Tilak's genius was at once comprehensive and subtle. '* In one swift gyre " it surveyed the whole extent of the subject in hand; at the same time there was nothing too minute for its ken. He developed argument after argument, built up theory after theory, with the same enjojmient with which he descended to the exhaustive discussion of the grammatical and philological peculiarities of a word; after surveying with his intellectual teleoscope the rise and progress of philosophical thoughts and systems, he did not disdain with microscopic minuteness to trace a missing verse from a refer-