ot
to be lightly tampered with.

It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of Kalidasa's subject that his
women appeal more strongly to a modern reader than his men. The man is
the more variable phenomenon, and though manly virtues are the same in
all countries and centuries, the emphasis has been variously laid. But
the true woman seems timeless, universal. I know of no poet, unless it
be Shakespeare, who has given the world a group of heroines so
individual yet so universal; heroines as true, as tender, as brave as
are Indumati, Sita, Parvati, the Yaksha's bride, and Shakuntala.

Kalidasa could not understand women without understanding children. It
would be difficult to find anywhere lovelier pictures of childhood
than those in which our poet presents the little Bharata, Ayus, Raghu,
Kumara. It is a fact worth noticing that Kalidasa's children are all
boys. Beautiful as his women are, he never does more than glance at a
little girl.

Another pervading note of Kalidasa's writing is his love of external
nature. No doubt it is easier for a Hindu, with his almost instinctive
belief in reincarnation, to feel that all life, from plant to god, is
truly one; yet none, even among the Hindus, has expressed this feeling
with such convincing beauty as has Kalidasa. It is hardly true to say
that he personifies rivers and mountains and trees; to him they have a
conscious individuality as truly and as certainly as animals or men or
gods. Fully to appreciate Kalidasa's poetry one must have spent some
weeks at least among wild mountains and forests untouched by man;
there the conviction grows that trees and flowers are indeed
individuals, fully conscious of a personal life and happy in that
life. The return to urban surroundings makes the vision fade; yet the
memory remains, like a great love or a glimpse of mystic insight, as
an intuitive conviction of a higher truth.

Kalidasa's knowledge of nature is not only sympathetic, it is also
minutely accurate. Not only are the snows and windy music of the
Himalayas, the mighty current of the sacred Ganges, his possession;
his too are smaller streams and trees and every littlest flower. It is
delightful to imagine a meeting between Kalidasa and Darwin. They
would have understood each other perfectly; for in each the same kind
of imagination worked with the same wealth of observed fact.

I have already hinted at the wonderful balance in Kalidasa's
character, by virtue of which he found h