Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/848

 806 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. noblest Sanskrit metres into Bengali, yet there is no trace of any struggle on his part for this end. He creates pictures in words, as for instance, in his description of Civa’s great wrath, to which | have already referred on page 668. This could not have been grander in any other language. When we peruse his poems we are ১০ powerfully captivated by his descriptions, that we quite forget that they were wrought in one of the most difficult metres of Sanskrit, with a perfection hitherto un- equalled in Bengali. Bharata Chandra’s writings have suffered considerably in the hands of his copyists who were ignorant of the rules of Sans- krit verse. They occasionally tampered with the readings, and copyists as a class have always done so in regard to all other poems, with this difference that in the case of works written by other poets they have occasionally improved on the orignal by such changes, whereas in the case Bharata Chan- dras’s works they have invariably done more harm than good, as the change of a single syllable would disturb his scheme of metre, a matter of which ordinary copyists had no knowledge. aie | quote below the famous lines in the dsujanga Civa’'s Beene my ee ক angerin frayata describing Givas anger. Now 1n the print- bhujanga ; prayata. ed books we hind শিঙ্গ। in the second line for শিডা, aa} in the 17th line for af. = having been chang- ed to ®, as the word forms a compound with ভূঙগী), The metre contains 12 letters in each line and runs thus ৮ ৮ . The text should be reduced to the following form for a right exposi- tion of the metre :—