The palace, the castle, the temple, and the tomb, all those works
which man is most proud to raise to spread and to perpetuate his
name, crumble to dust beneath her withering grasp. She rises
triumphant over them all in her lofty beauty, bearing high in air
amidst her light green foliage fragments of the wreck she has made,
to show the nothingness of man's greatest efforts.
While sitting at my tent-door looking out upon this beautiful sheet
of water, and upon all the noble works around me, I thought of the
charge, so often made against the people of this fine land, of the
total want of _public spirit_ among them, by those who have spent
their Indian days in the busy courts of law, and still more busy
commercial establishments of our great metropolis.
If by the term public spirit be meant a disposition on the part of
individuals to sacrifice their own enjoyments, or their own means of
enjoyment for the common good, there is perhaps no people in the
world among whom it abounds so much as among the people of India. To
live in the grateful recollections of their countrymen for benefits
conferred upon them in great works of ornament and utility is the
study of every Hindoo of rank and property.
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