Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/352

 beauty. Some of their charm is, however, lost in translation owing to the impossibility of reproducing the elaborate metres employed in the original. Several Sanskrit poets composed collections of these miniature lyrics.

The most eminent of these authors is, grammarian, philosopher, and poet in one. Only the literary training of India could make such a combination possible, and even there it has hardly a parallel. Bhartṛihari lived in the first half of the seventh century. The Chinese traveller I Tsing, who spent more than twenty years in India at the end of that century, records that, having turned Buddhist monk, the poet again became a layman, and fluctuated altogether seven times between the monastery and the world. Bhartṛihari blamed himself for, but could not overcome, his inconstancy. He wrote three centuries of detached stanzas. Of the first and last, which are sententious in character, there will be occasion to say something later. Only the second, entitled Çṛingāra-çataka, or "Century of Love," deals with erotic sentiment. Here Bhartṛihari, in graceful and meditative verse, shows himself to be well acquainted both with the charms of women and with the arts by which they captivate the hearts of men. Who, he asks in one of these miniature poems, is not filled with yearning thoughts of love in spring, when the air swoons with the scent of the mango blossom and is filled with the hum of bees intoxicated with honey? In another he avers that none can resist the charms of lotus-eyed maidens, not even learned men, whose utterances about renouncing love are mere idle words. The poet himself laments that, when his beloved is away, the brightness goes out of his life—