Page:The Mégha Dúta or Cloud Messenger (Second Edition).djvu/9

 V in India, contemplate with additional interest and pleasure, from his previous acquaintance with the verses of Kalidasa. Little is known of the literary history of the Megha Dtita. It is, by common assent, attributed to Kalidasa, a celebrated poet, who is reputed to have been one of the ornaments of the Court of Vikrama- ditya, king of Ujayin, whose reign, used as a chronological epoch by the Hindus, is placed 56 years before the Christian sera. There is no reason to dispute the truth of these traditions. The poem undoubtedly belongs to a classical period of Hindu Literature ; and that period, there is reason to believe, did not long survive the first centuries of Christianity. At a later date, the Poets were men of more scholarship than imagination, and substituted an overwrought display of the powers of the language for the unforced utterance of the dictates of the feeling or the fancy. This is not the case with the Megha Duta ; and although it is rather of a more sustained elevation of language than other works attributed to the same author, particularly his dramatic compositions, Sakuntala, and Vikrama and Urvasi, yet there is a community of character in them, a similar fidelity to nature, a like delicacy and tenderness of feeling, and the same felicity of description, gracefulness of imagery, and elegance of expression, which leave it sufficiently probable that they are the works of the same master-hand. There are, indeed, in the Vikrama and Urvasi especially, passages which call the Megha Duta to recollection ; and in one place, where the deserted monarch inquires of the passing Cloud whither Urvasf has fled, we have the germ of the perhaps later poem, the Cloud Messenger. Of the other works attributed to Kalidasa, the Ritu-sanhara, Raghuvansa, Malavikagnimitra, Kumara-sambhava, Sringara-tilaka, Prasnottara-mala, Hasyamava, and Sruta-bodha, some of them are certainly not of his composition.

The Text of the Megha Duta has been the subject of very industrious