Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/19

14 the poet, with a more refined sentiment than the legend, is uneasy regarding this primitive incest, and represents Yamī as intent on an effort, fruitless so far as the hymn goes, to induce Yama to accept and make fruitful her proffered love. A tantalizing, but certainly interesting, hymn in the same book (x. 95) gives a dialogue between Purūravas, and the nymph Urvaçī; he rebukes her inconstancy, but does not succeed in making her refrain from withdrawing from his gaze. In viii. 100 Nema Bhārgava utters an appeal to Indra, to which the god is pleased to give a reply. Sometimes there are three interlocutors; thus Agastya, the sage, has a conversation (i. 179) of an enigmatic type with his wife, Lopāmudrā, and their son; not less obscure is the dialogue between Indra and Vasukra, in which the wife of the latter plays a small part, in x. 28; and in iv. 18 we have a most confused dialogue between Indra, Aditi, and Vāmadeva. Even less intelligible is the famous debate between Indra, his wife, Indrāṇī, and Vṛṣākapi (x. 86), each interpreter of which is able to show the absurdity of the versions of his predecessors but seems incapable of recognizing the defects of his own. Or one of the interlocutors may be a troop, not an individual. Thus Saramā, the messenger of Indra, seeking the kine which have been taken away, goes to the demons, the Paṇis, and holds with them lively debate (x. 108). The gods also have a hard business (x. 51-3) to persuade Agni, the living fire, to persevere in the tedious occupation of bearing to them the oblations of mortals, and the dialogue in which they engage is vivid in the extreme, extending even to the breaking of a stanza into portions for two interlocutors. Two dialogues are of interest for their historical allusions, the converse of Viçvāmitra and the rivers (iii. 33) which he seeks to cross, and that of Vasiṣṭha with his sons (vii. 33), if indeed that is the correct interpretation of the speakers of the hymn. Indra again disputes with the Maruts (i. 165 and 170), who had disgraced themselves in his eyes by deserting him in the thick of his contest with the demon Vṛtra, but who succeed at last in placating his anger; in the former hymn Agastya seems also to intervene, by summing up the result at the close, and invoking the favour of the gods for himself. Similarly the account of Viçvāmitra's dialogue ends with the assertion that