University of Virginia Library

Note.—We yield to none in our cordial admiration of Mr. Edwin Arnold's “Light of Asia;” but we regard that most eloquent, pathetic, and beautiful poem, chiefly as a poem—and by no means as an absolutely authoritative presentation of Gautama's creed, or its tendencies. It even seems to us that Mr. Arnold is himself somewhat in the dark as to these matters. The “prodigious controversy among the erudite in regard to Gautama's doctrines,” Mr. Arnold confronts chiefly by his own firm conviction that “a third of mankind would never have been brought to believe in blank abstractions, or in nothingness, as the crown of Being!” Au contraire, we cannot fairly ignore the opinion of those Orientalists who maintain, that “Nirvana” is essentially nothingness; and moreover, that the idea involved in it has a peculiar charm for the Hindoo mind.