rly. It has been shown by H.
Jacobi from the astrological data contained in the poem that
the date of its composition cannot be placed earlier than
about the middle of the fourth century A.D.]

Little as we know of Indian poetry, here and there an English reader
may be found, who is not entirely unacquainted with the name or works
of the author of the beautiful dramas of SAKONTALA and THE HERO AND
THE NYMPH, the former of which has long enjoyed an European celebrity
in the translation of SIR WILLIAM JONES, and the latter is one of the
most charming of PROFESSOR WILSON'S specimens of the Hindu Theatre;
here and there even in England may be found a lover of the graceful,
tender, picturesque, and fanciful, who knows something, and would
gladly know more, of the sweet poet of the CLOUD MESSENGER, and THE
SEASONS; whilst in Germany he has been deeply studied in the original,
and enthusiastically admired in translation,--not the Orientalist
merely, but the poet, the critic, the natural philosopher,--a GOETHE,
a SCHLEGEL, a HUMBOLDT, having agreed, on account of his tenderness of
feeling and his rich creative imagination, to set KALIDASA very high
among the glorious company of the Sons of Song.[B]

[B] Goethe says:

Willst du die Bluethe des fruehen, die Fruechte des spaeteren
Jahres,
Willst du was reizt and entzueckt, willst du was saettigt
and naehrt,
Willst du den Himmel, die Erde, mit einem Namen begreifen;
Nenn' ich Sakontala, Dich, und so ist Alles gesagt.

See also Schlegel's Dramatic Literature, Lect. II., and
Humboldt's Kosmos, Vol. II. p. 40, and note.

That the poem which is now for the first time offered to the general
reader, in an English dress, will not diminish this reputation is the
translator's earnest hope, yet my admiration of the grace and beauty
that pervade so much of the work must not allow me to deny that
occasionally, even in the noble Sanskrit, if we judge him by an
European standard, KALIDASA is bald and prosaic. Nor is this a defence
of the translator at the expense of the poet. Fully am I conscious how
far I am from being able adequately to reproduce the fanciful creation
of the sweet singer of OUJEIN; that numerous beauties of thought and
expression I may have passed by, mistaken, marred; that in many of the
more elaborate descriptions my own versification is 'harsh as the
jarring of a tuneless chord' compared with the