Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/291

 style of the romances or prose kāvyas, subject as it is to the strict rules of poetics, is as clumsy as that of the grammatical commentaries; for the use of immense compounds, like those of the Sūtras, is one of its essential characteristics.

Sanskrit literature, then, resembles that of the earlier Vedic age in being almost entirely metrical. But the metres in which it is written, though nearly all based on those of the Veda, are different. The bulk of the literature is composed in the çloka, a development of the Vedic anushṭubh stanza of four octosyllabic lines; but while all four lines ended iambically in the prototype, the first and third line have in the çloka acquired a trochaic rhythm. The numerous other metres employed in the classical poetry have become much more elaborate than their Vedic originals by having the quantity of every syllable in the line strictly determined.

The style, too, excepting the two old epics, is in Sanskrit poetry made more artificial by the frequent use of long compounds, as well as by the application of the elaborate rules of poetics, while the language is regulated by the grammar of Pāṇini. Thus classical Sanskrit literature, teeming as it does with fantastic and exaggerated ideas, while bound by the strictest rules of form, is like a tropical garden full of luxuriant and rank growth, in which, however, many a fair flower of true poetry may be culled.

It is impossible even for the Sanskrit scholar who has not lived in India to appreciate fully the merits of this later poetry, much more so for those who can only become acquainted with it in translations. For, in the first place, the metres, artificial and elaborate though they are, have a beauty of their own which cannot