Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/443

 DEVOTIONAL SONGS 419 they expressed the varieties of their religious experience in touching songs accessible to all. There is no other conspicuous instance of this type of Sa/t/-worship through the Maty-daéa in ancient literature. The classical example king Suratha’s propitiation of the Adya Sak/i described in the Markandeya Chandi is altogether of a different kind ; nor could the earlier Bengali Chandi-authors, who indulged themselves in hymns or elaborate narratives of praise, anticipate the sentiment of tender devotion and _half- childish solicitation of Ram-prasad.'| In this respect the originality of Ram-pras&d is undoubted and it exalts him to a place all his own. The Baisnab poets, again, describe in their exquisite lyries a type of love which is lifted beyond the restrictions of social convention and their love- 2 সি বসা lyries, passionate and often sensuous, discrimination. may, in the uninitiated, excite worldly desires instead of inspiring a sense of freedom from worldly attachments. The songs of Ram- prasad and his followers, on the other hand, are free from this dangerous tendency. Although these simple and tender longings for the Mother may not, in thought and diction, compare favourably with the finer outbursts of the Baignab poets, yet they are accessible indiscriminately to the uninitiated as well as the initiated, to the sinner as well as tothe saint, to the ignorant as well as to the learned. They constitute the common property of all, and as in the case of the tender love of the mother, every human child has an equal claim to share it. ' The exceedingly humanised picture of Gauri or Diirg& in Rame. Gvar’s Sib@yan or even in Bhérat Chandra’s Annadamangal represents an altogether different phase of perhaps the same humanising tendency in contemporary literature,