Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.89

v1.c5.89

the sprouting of the moustache for the youth, and in this she is like he, sisters among very many peoples. As almost everywhere on the earth, the girl on the Ganges from her earliest years knows all about every thing, and with her the coming of puberty excites a lively interest, and is even hailed with much rejoicing. That most delightful thing in the world—the maiden blossoming in sweet ignorance, and the half-painful, half-joyful emotional billowing of her soul, wrapped in holy and pure dream secrets—this, indeed, the Hindu does not know. Still this most delicate, ethereal bloom of European culture is by no means so very common amongst us, and, moreover, in our days under sentence of death under the dazzling beams of the sun of “sexual knowledge”—poor, fairy-tale wonder of the moonlight night. Thus no Hindu maiden could give utterance to such a fragrant delicacy of feeling as we find expressed in the fairest puberty poem in the world in *Neidon valitus*, the “Maiden’s Lament”, of the Finnish poet Eerikki Ticklén, who died, all too young, in 1827 (cp. J. J. Meyer, *Vom Land der tausend Seen. Eine Abhandlung über die neuere finnische Literatur und eine Auswahl aus modernen finnischen Novellisten* (p. 33). The reader may be here reminded, too, of Peter Hille’s wonderful *Brautseele*.