Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/199

 Religious Conceptions and Feeling 183 singularly poetic. I shall show later that the relig— ious consciousness, in so far as it concentrates itself upon their admiration and praise, marks in fact the highest point in the Vedic Rishis’ mental and spirit- ual possibilities. In the end it will be found to be something more than religious poetry; it is rather religion or religious sense expressing itself as poetic inspiration. Anyhow we must not believe that the ritual has swamped everything. The delight in the gods, especially the half-personalised nature forces which are treated as gods, is too unstinted and gen" erous to allow us to doubt its genuineness. I am sure that many, if not all, of these poets addressed their beautiful hymns to the goddess Dawn, or to the sun~god Surya with the full swing of creative poets, delighting in their theme for the theme’s sake, and chiseling their poems for the poems’ sake. We may believe that these priests-poets at times, when in their best vein, asked the favor of the gods not as greedy beggars, but as joyously unconscious bene- ﬁciaries of divinities whose power to reward is in- cidental to their inherent generous nature, and who, therefore present themselves as a brilliant and worthy theme of song.

But the everyday existence of these men is something different. It is loaded down with those dreadful practicalities. They must live by this