From the PREFACE This little book contains a selection of forty hymns from the Rigveda, translated in verse corresponding as nearly as is possible in English to the original metres. I have endeavoured to make the rendering as close as the use of verse will admit. Prose would have been more exact if I had had in view the requirements of linguistic students, but the general reader, to whom the spirit of the original hymns is the important thing, would have lost the means of appreciating, to some extent at least, the poetic beauty of the Vedic metres which form a considerable element in the literary charm of the hymns. Although there are four Vedas, this selection of hymns has been made exclusively from the oldest and most important, the Rigveda. From it the other three have largely borrowed their matter, containing otherwise little that would be of interest in this selection. The chief metres are here reproduced, and each of the most important gods is represented by at least one hymn. Of the comparatively few hymns not addressed to deities, I have also chosen a certain number dealing with cosmogony and eschatology, social life and magical ideas. This volume thus furnishes an epitome of the Rigveda, the earliest monument of Indian thought, the source from which the poetical and religious literature of India has in great part been derived and developed during a period of more than three thousand years.