Page:Love in Hindu Literature.djvu/76

 62 V. THE BOIIJNG-POINT OF LOVE-HEAT.

scale for measuring the art-heat, the emotion-heat, the life's intensity, the passion's glow, the love's caloric, of all races and all ages. It will evaluate and "standardize" •the world's literary treasures and find out the Popes, the Blakes, the Burnses, the Wordsworths, fhe Byrons, the Schillers, the Klingers, the Shelleys, the Chateau- briands, the La Martines, the Victor Hugos, the Rx)S- settis, the Brownings, and Whitmans, of the human race.

The atmosphere that Vidyapati breathes is the atmosphere of Shelley, or the Italian atmosphere of Rossetti, the prophet of pi-e-Raphaelitisni. He is the •poet of passion at the boiling point. His Radha and Krishna are boiling-point creations. And the boiling- point creations of any poet of the world would be brothers and sisters to the Hindu Krishna and Radha. Like Romeo and Juliet, these creations of Indian art stand as norms of sex-life's intensity. There is nothing local or national or Indian or Hindu or mediaeval in Vidyapati's Radha and Krishna. Vidyapati dwells above the snow-line where the mountain peaks are ever capped with snow. All dwellers above the snowline are his kin. The Alpine heights, the Rocky heights and the Himalayan heights present, beyond a certain level, the same panorama of " eternal sunshine " and of. " Peaks where the lilies tremble against the snow. Far bleak crags, with their lights that every hour Change, till the fire dies from the sun's last glow." Souls all ablaze must, like the snow-capped hill-tops of Asia, Europe, Africa and America, be cognates with a family-likeness wheresoever they be born. Imagination and Art above snowline must be uniform.

The kinship of world's idealists and mystics is very well