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 Sakontalá 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 Hindú 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 Kálidása very high among the glorious company of the Sons of Song.[1]
That the Poem which is now for the first time
- ↑ Goethe says:
Willst du die Blüthe des frühen, die Früchte des späteren Jahres,
Willst du was reizt und entzückt, willst du was sättigt und nährt,
Willst du den Himmel, die Erde, mit einem Namen begreifen;
Nenn' ich Sakontalá, Dich, und so ist Alles gesagt.See also Schlegel's Dramatic Literature, Lect. II., and Humboldt's Kosmos, Vol. II. p. 40, and note.
