Dry Nagkeser, in silver smiling,
Hot Kiticum our sense beguiling,
And last, to kindle fierce the scorching flame,
Loveshaft, which gods bright Bela name.

Can men resist thy power, when Krishen yields,
Krishen, who still in Matra's holy fields
Tunes harps immortal, and to strains divine
Dances by moonlight with the Gopia nine?
But, when thy daring arm untamed
At Mahadeo a loveshaft aim'd,
Heaven shook, and, smit with stony wonder,
Told his deep dread in bursts of thunder,
Whilst on thy beauteous limbs an azure fire
Blazed forth, which never must expire.

O thou for ages born, yet ever young
For ages may thy Brahmin's lay be sung!
And, when thy lory spreads his emerald wings
To waft thee high above the towers of kings,
Whilst o'er thy throne the moon's pale light
Pours her soft radiance through the night,
And to each floating cloud discovers

The haunts of bless'd or joyless lovers,
Thy mildest influence to thy bard impart,
To warm, but not consume, his heart.

TWO HYMNS TO PRACRITI.

THE ARGUMENT.

In all our conversations with learned Hindoos, we find them enthusiastic admirers of poetry, which they consider as a divine art, that had been practised for number

several books of Tasso, and to the dramas of Metastasio, are obvious instances; but, that any interest may be taken in the two hymns addressed to Pracriti, under different names, it is necessary to render them intelligible by a previous explanation of the mythological allusions, which could not but occur in them.

Iswara, or Isa, and Isani, or Isi, are unquestionably the Osiris and Isis of Egypt; for, though neither a resemblance of names, nor a similarity of character, would separately prove the identity of Indian and Egyptian deities, yet, when they both concur, with the addition of numberless corroborating circumstances, they form a proof little short of demonstration. The female divinity, in the mythological systems in the East, represents the active power of the male; and that Isi means active nature appears evidently from the word s'acta, which is derived from s'acti, or power, and applied to those Hindoos who direct their adoration principally to that goddess: this feminine character of Pracriti, or created nature, is so familiar in most languages, and even in our own, that the gravest English writers, on the most serious subjects of religion and philosophy, speak of her operations as if she were actually an animated being; but such personifications are easily misconceived by the multitude, and have a strong tendency to polytheism. The principal operations of nature are, not the absolute annihilation and new creation of what we call material substances, but the temporary extinction and reproduction, or rather, in one word, the transmutation of forms: whence the epithet Polymorphos is aptly given to nature by European philosophers: hence Iswara, Siva, Hara, (for those are his names and near a thousand more) united with Isi, represent the secondary causes, whatever they may be, of natural phenomena, and principally those of temporary destruction and regeneration; but the Indian Isis appears in a variety of characters, especially in those of Parvati, Cali, Durga, and Bhavani, which bear a strong resemblance to the Juno of Homer, to Hecate, to the armed Pallas, and to the Lucretian Venus.

tion. Himalaya, or the Mansion of Snow, is the title given by the Hindoos to that vast chain of mountains, which limits India to the north, and embraces it with its eastern and western arms, both extending to the Ocean; the former of those arms is called Chandrasec'hara, or the Moon's Rock; and the second, which reaches as far west as the mouths of the Indus, was named by the ancients Montes Parveti. These hills are held sacred by the Indians, who suppose them to be the terrestrial haunt of the god Iswara. The mountain Himalaya, being per sonified, is represented as a powerful monarch, whose wife was Mena: their daughter is named Parvati, or Mountain-born, and Durga, or of difficult access; but the Hindoos believe her to have been married to Siva in a

The name Parvati took its rise from a wild poetical fic.

daughter of Himalaya had two sons; Ganesa, or the Lord of Spirits, adored as the wisest of deities, and always invoked at the beginning of every literary work, and Cumara, Scanda, or Carticeya, commander of the celes

less ages in heaven, before it was revealed on earth by Valmic, whose great heroic poem is fortunately preserved: the Brahmins of course prefer that poetry, which they believe to have been actually inspired; while the Vaidyas, (who are in general perfect gramma. rians and good poets, but are not suffered to read any of the sacred writings except the Ayurveda, or Body of Medical Tracts,) speak with rapture of their innumerable popular poems, epic, lyric, and dramatic, which were composed by men not literally inspired, but called, metaphorically, the sons of Sereswati, or Minerva; among whom the Pandits of all sects, nations, and degrees, are unanimous in giving the prize of glory to Ca lidasa, who flourished in the court of Vicramaditya, fifty-seven years before Christ. He wrote several dra. mas, one of which, entitled Sacontala, is in my posses-pre-existent state, when she bore the name of Sati. The sion; and the subject of it appears to be as interesting as the composition is beautiful; besides these he published the Meghaduta, or cloud-messenger, and the Nalodaya, or rise of Nala, both elegant love tales: the Raghuvansa, an heroic poem; and the Cumara Sambhava, or birth of Cumara, which supplied me with ma terials for the first of the following odes. I have not indeed yet read it; since it could not be correctly copied for me during the short interval in which it is in my pow. er to amuse myself with literature: but I have heard the story told, both in Sanscrit and Persian, by many Pandits, who had no communication with each other; and their outline of it coincided so perfectly, that I am convinced of its correctness: that outline is here filled up, and exhibited in a lyric form, partly in the Indian, partly in the Grecian taste; and great will be my pleasure, when I can again find time for such amusements, in reading the whole poem of Calidassa, and in comparing my descriptions with the original composition. To anticipate the story in a preface, would be to destroy the interest that may be taken in the poem: a disadvantage attending all prefatory arguments, of which those prefixed to the

tial armies.

The pleasing fiction of Cama, the Indian Cupid, and his friend Vasanta, or the Spring, has been the subject of another poem: and here it must be remembered, that the god of Love is named also Smara, Candarpa, and Ananga. One of his arrows is called Mellica, the Nyctanthes of our botanists, who very unadvisedly reject the vernacular names of most Asiatic plants: it is beautifully introduced by Cálidasa into this lively couplet;

Mellicamucule bhati gunjanmattamadhuvratah, Prayane panchaoanasya sanc'hamapurayanniva. "The intoxicated bee shines and murmurs in the fresh blown Mellica, like him who gives breath to a white conch in the procession of the god with five arrows."

A critic to whom Cálidasa repeated this verse, observed, that the comparison was not exact: since the bee sits on the blossom itself, and does not murmur at the end of the tube, like him who blows a conch. "I was aware of

that," said the poet," and, therefore, described the bee as intoxicated: a drunken musician would blow the shell at the wrong end." There was more than wit in this answer; it was a just rebuke to a dull critic; for poetry delights in general images, and is so far from being a perfect imitation, that a scrupulous exactness of descriptions and similes, by leaving nothing for the imagination to supply, never fails to diminish or destroy the pleasure of every reader who has an imagination to be gratified.

It may here be observed, that Nymphæa, not Lotos, is the generic name in Europe of the flower consecrated to Isis: the Persians know by the name of Nilufer that species of it which the botanists ridiculously call Nelumbo, and which is remarkable for its curious pericarpium, where each of the seeds contains in miniature the leaves of a perfect vegetable. The lotos of Homer was probably the sugar-cane, and that of Linnæus is a papilionaceous plant; but he gives the same name to another species of the Nymphæa; and the word is so constantly applied among us in India to the Nilufer, that any other would be hardly intelligible: the blue lotos grows in Cashmir and in Persia, but not in Bengal, where we see only the red and white; and hence occasion is taken to feign, that the lotus of Hindoostan was dyed crimson by the blood of Siva.

Cuvera, mentioned in the fourteenth stanza, is the god of wealth, supposed to reside in a magnificent city, called Alaca; and Vrihaspati, or the genius of the planet Jupi. ter, is the preceptor of the gods in Swerga or the firmament: he is usually represented as their orator, when any message is carried from them to one of their superior

deities.

own language, I cannot refrain from subjoining the first Nemean Ode, not only in the same measure as nearly as possible, but almost word for word with the original; those epithets and phrases only being necessarily added, which are printed in Italic letters.

TO DURGA.

I. 1.

FROM thee begins the solemn air,

Adored Ganésá; next, thy sire we praise,
(Him, from whose red clustering hair
A new-born crescent sheds propitious rays,
Fair as Gangá's curling foam,)
Dread Iswara; who loved o'er awful mountains,
Rapt in prescience deep, to roam,
But chiefly those, whence holy rivers gush,
Bright from their secret fountains,
And o'er the realms of Brahmá rush.

I. 2.

Rock above rock they ride sublime,
And lose their summits in blue fields of day,
Fashion'd first, when rolling time
Vast infant, in his golden cradle lay,
Bidding endless ages run,

And wreathe their giant heads in snows eternal
Gilt by each revolving sun;

The lamentations of Reti, the wife of Cama, fill a whole
book in the Sanscrit poem, as I am informed by my teach-In wintry sign or vernal,
er, a learned Vaidya; who is restrained only from read Their adamantine strength impair;
ing the book, which contains a description of the nuptials;
for the ceremonies of a marriage where Brahma himself
officiated as the father of the bridegroom, are too holy to
be known by any but Brahmins.

Though neither morning beam, nor noontide glare,

The achievements of Durga in her martial character as the patroness of Virtue, and her battle with a demon in the shape of a buffalo, are the subject of many episodes in the Puranas and Cávyas, or sacred and popular poems; but a full account of them would have destroyed the unity of the ode, and they are barely alluded to in the

last stanza.

It seemed proper to change the measure, when the goddess was to be addressed as Bhavani, or the power of fecundity; but such a change, though very common in Sanscrit, has its inconveniences in European poetry: a distinct hymn is therefore appropriated to her in that capacity; for the explanation of which we need only premise, that Lacshmi is the goddess of abundance; that the Cetata is a fragrant and beautiful plant of the Diœcian kind, known to botanists by the name Pandanus; and that the Durgótsava, or great festival of Bhavani at the close of the rains, ends in throwing the image of the god. dess into the Ganges, or other sacred waters.

I am not conscious of having left unexplained any difficult allusion in the two poems; and have only to add (lest European critics should consider a few of the images as inapplicable to Indian manners) that the ideas of snow and ice are familiar to the Hindoos; that the mountains of Himalaya may be clearly discerned from a part of Bengal; that the Grecian Hamus is the Sanscrit word kaimas, meaning snowy; and that funeral urns may be seen perpetually on the banks of the river.

The two hymns are neither translations from any other poems, nor imitations of any; and have nothing of Pindar in them except the measures, which are nearly the same, syllable for syllable, with those of the first and second Nemean Odes: more musical stanzas might perhaps have been formed; but in every art, variety and novelty are considerable sources of pleasure. The style and manner of Pindar have been greatly mistaken; and that a distinct idea of them may be conceived by such, as have not access to that inimitable poet in his

I. 3.

Nor e'en the fiercest summer heat

Could thrill the palace, where their monarch reign'd
On his frost impearled seat,

(Such height had unremitted virtue gain'd!)
Himálaya, to whom a lovely child;
Sweet Parvatí, sage Ména bore,
Who now in earliest bloom, saw heaven adore
Her charms; earth languish, till she smiled.
II. 1.

But she to love no tribute paid;
Great Iswara her pious cares engaged:
Him, who gods and fiends dismay'd,
She sooth'd with offerings meek, when most he
raged.

On a morn, when, edged with light,
The lake-born flowers their sapphire cups expanded
Laughing at the scatter'd night,

A vale remote and silent pool she sought,
Smooth-footed, lotos-handed,
And braids of sacred blossoms wrought;

II. 2.

Not for her neck, which, unadorn'd,
Bade envying antelopes their beauties hide :
Art she knew not, or she scorn'd;
Nor had her language e'en a name for pride,
To the god, who, fix'd in thought,
Sat in a crystal cave new worlds designing,
Softly sweet her gift she brought,
And spread the garland o'er his shoulders broad,
Where serpents huge lay twining,
Whose hiss the round creation awed.

See p. 58.

II. 3.

IV. 3.

He view'd, half-smiling, half-severe,

There on a crag whose icy rift

The prostrate maid—that moment through the rocks Hurl'd night and horror o'er the pool profound,

He who decks the purple year,
Vasanta, vain of odoriferous locks,

With Cama, horsed on infant breezes flew.
(Who knows not Cama, nature's king?)
Vasanta barb'd the shaft and fix'd the string;
The living bow Candarpa drew.

III. 1

Dire sacrilege! the chosen reed,

That Smara pointed with transcendant art,
Glanced with unimagined speed,

And tinged its blooming barb in Siva's heart:
Glorious flower, in heaven proclaim'd
Rich Mellicà, with balmy breath delicious,
And on earth Nyctanthes named!

Some drops divine, that o'er the lotos blue
Trickled in rills auspicious,

Still mark'd it with a crimson hue.

III. 2.

Soon closed the wound its hallow'd lips;
But nature felt the pain: heaven's blazing eye
Sank absorb'd in sad eclipse,

And meteors rare betray'd the trembling sky;
When a flame, to which compared

The keenest lightnings were but idle flashes,
From that orb all-piercing glared,

Which in the front of wrathful Hara rolls,
And soon to silver ashes

Reduced th' inflamer of our souls.

III. 3.

Vasant, for thee a milder doom,
Accomplice rash, a thundering voice decreed:
"Withering live in joyless gloom,

While ten gay signs the dancing seasons lead.
Thy flowers, perennial once, now annual made,
The fish and ram shall still adorn:

But when the bull has rear'd his golden horn,
Shall, like yon idling rainbow, fade."

IV. 1.

The thunder ceased; the day return'd;
But Siva from terrestrial haunts had fled:
Smit with rapturous love he burn'd,

And sigh'd on gemm'd Cailása's viewless head.
Lonely down the mountain steep,

With fluttering heart, soft Parvati descended;
Nor in drops of nectar'd sleep

Drank solace through the night, but lay alarm'd,
Lest her mean gifts offended

The god her powerful beauty charm'd.

IV. 2.

All arts her sorrowing damsels tried,

[smooth.

Her brow, where wrinkled anguish lour'd, to
And, her troubled soul to sooth,
Sagacious Mena mild reproof applied;
But nor art nor counsel sage,

Nor e'en her sacred parent's tender chiding,
Could her only pain assuage:

The rest my song conceal :

Unhallow'd ears the sacrilege might rue.
Gods alone to gods reveal

In what stupendous notes th' immortals woo.
Straight the sons of light prepared

The nuptial feast, heaven's opal gates unfolding,
Which th' empyreal army shared ;

The mountain drear she sought in mantling shade And sage Himálaya shed blissful tears,

Her tears and transports hiding,

And oft to her adorer pray'd.

With aged eyes beholding

His daughter, empress of the spheres.