Daily Telegraph and other papers and magazines (1894); The Tenth Muse and Other Poems (1895). He has translated The Euterpe of Herodotus from the Greek; and from the Sanskrit, the Hitopodesh, or "Book of Good Counsels," and two Books of the Mahabharata, which has been styled "the Iliad of India." The works by which he is best known are the poems Indian Song of Songs and The Light of Asia, of which he says: "The time may come, I hope, when these books will preserve the memory of one who loved India and the Indian peoples." The "Light of Asia" is not Gautama or Buddha himself, but that doctrine of which he was the founder and promulgator, to the exposition of which the poem is devoted, and of the general character of which Mr. Arnold thus speaks in the preface of his work :

BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.

The Buddha of this poem-if, as need not be doubted, he really existed-was born on the borders of Nepaul, about 620 B.C., and died about 543 B.C. at Kusinagara in Oudh. In point of age, therefore, most other creeds are youthful when compared with this venerable religion, which has in it the eternity of a universal hope, the immortality of a boundless love, an indestructible element of faith in final good, and the proudest assertion ever made of human freedom. The extravagances which disfigure the record and practice of Buddhism are to be referred to that inevitable degradation which priesthoods always inflict upon the great ideas committed to their charge. The power and sublimity of Gautama's original doctrines should be estimated by their influence, not by their interpreters; nor by that innocent but lazy and ceremonious Church which has arisen on the foundations of the Buddhistic Brotherhood or Sangha.

More than a third of mankind owe their moral and religious ideas to this illustrious Prince, whose personality, though imperfectly revealed in the existing sources of information, cannot but appear the highest, gentlest, holiest, and most beneficent-with one exception-in the history of Thought. Discordant in frequent particulars, and sorely overlaid by corruptions, inventions, and misconceptions, the Buddhistical books yet agree in the one point of recording nothing-no single act or word-which mars the perfect purity and tenderness of this Indian Teacher, who united the truest princely qualities with the intellect of the sage and the passionate devotion of the martyr. Though Gautama discountenanced ritual, and declared himself, even when on the threshold of Nirvána, to be only what all other men might become, yet the love and gratitude of Asia, disobeying his mandate, have given him fervent worship. Forests of flowers are daily laid upon his stainless shrines, and countless millions of lips daily repeat the formula, "I take refuge in Buddha.'

A generation ago little or nothing was known in Europe of this great faith of Asia, which had nevertheless existed during twenty-four centuries, and at this day surpasses, in the number of its followers and the area of its prevalence, any other form of creed. Four hundred and seventy millions of our race live and die in the tenets of Gautama; and the spiritual dominions of this ancient teacher extend, at the present time, from Nepaul and Ceylon over the whole Eastern Peninsula to China, Japan, Thibet, Central Asia, Siberia, and even Swedish Lapland. India itself might fairly be included in this magnificent empire of belief; for though the profession of Buddhism has for the most part passed away from the land of its birth, the mark of Gautama's sublime teaching is stamped ineffaceably upon modern Brahmanism, and the most characteristic habits and convictions of the Hindus are clearly due to the benign influence of Buddha's precepts.

I have put my poem into a Buddhist's mouth, because to appreciate the spirit of Asiatic thoughts, they should be regarded from the Oriental point of view; and neither the miracles which consecrate this record, nor