Page:The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás.djvu/36

xvi passage; while on the other hand both the terminology and the syntactic collocation of the words are in the highest degree perplexing to the European student, and severely try his knowledge of the language. As has been said of Spenser in the Faerie Queene, Tulsi Dás never scruples on his own authority to cut down or alter a word, or to adopt a mere corrupt pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rhyme. His treatment of words, on occasions of difficulty to his verse, is arbitrary in the extreme. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists off the head or the tail of the unfortanate vocable altogether. Such vagaries, being unconsciously regulated by the genius of the language, are no more puzzling to a Hindu than the colloquialisms of Sam Weller or Mrs. Gamp are to an English reader of Dickens. But the would seem inexplicable mysteries to any Anglo-Indian official, who knew only the language of the courts, and had never studied the vernacular of the people. For such neglect there has hitherto been much exeuse, in the absence both of a dictionary and a grammar; but the latter want has now been most admirably supplied by Mr. Kellogg, of the Allahabad American Presbyterian Mission, in a work that leaves nothing to be desired, and is in a remarkable degree both lucid and exhaustive; while Mr. Bate's dictionary, though searcely intended for very advanced students, will be of much use to beginners, since it gives in alphabetical order all the archaic forms of inflection, which at the outset are found so perplexing.

The second book is more generally read than any other part of the poem, and is the most admired by Hindu critics. The description of king Dasarath's death and the different leavetakings are quoted as models of the pathetic, and in a public recital there is scarcely one in the andience who will not be moved to tears. The sentiments that the poet depiets, and the figures that he employs to illustrate them, appeal with irresistible force to the Hindu imagination; and, if for no other reason than this, they would be interesting to the English student for the insight they afford into the traditional sympathies and antipathies of the people. The constant repetition of a few stereotyped phrases—such as 'lotus feet,' 'streaming eyes,' 'quivering frame'—are irritating to modern European taste, though they find a parallel in the stock epithets of the Homeric poems, and a still more striking one in Klopstock's Messiah, where similar expressions are for ever recurring in wearisome reiteration. Everybody wonders and weeps