Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/658

 618 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. gazelle. But it is as a sign of his disappointment and defeat that the gazelle kicks the ground with his hoofs. God took the quintessence of the moon and made Damayanti’s face. Soa hole was made on the moon’s surface and they call it a spot. The lotuses have all fled into the watery forts being struck by the beauty of Damayanti’s face. Before God had created Damayanti, he exercised himself in the art of creating feminine beauty by his creation of all other women, so that he might give perfection to that single form of Damayanti; and when the ideal was reached in her, the subsequent forms were created only to establish the superiority of Damayanti over the rest.” | Not only the Naisadha Charita, but Dagakumara Charita, Harsa Charita and other Sanskrit works admired in this period, abound with passages like the above, and these served as models to the Ben- gali writers who were under the immediate influence of the courts, and they themselves began to regale on niceties which now seem so absurd to us. The Persian poems which were favoured in this age, also contain long drawn-out similes verging on the ridiculous, and the noblemen and scholars, who prided themselves on a vain-glorious pedantry, encouraged our poets to introduce similar artifi- cial compositions into Bengali. Here are a few short passages translated from a favourite Persian work of the period. ‘Her black hair was like a net to catch the wise.” ‘ The lustre of her nails kept the hearts of all men fixed on them. They were like so many rising moons’. “Her waist was slender as a single hair or rather half of it.’-—Zelekha.