NATURAL DESCRIPTIONS BV THE INDIANS. 51 



ness of feeling and richness of creative fancy entitle him to a 

 high place in the ranks of the poets of all nations. The charm 

 of his descriptions of nature is strikingly exemplified in the 

 beautiful drama of Vikrama and Urvasi, where the king 

 wanders through the thickets of the forest in search of the 

 nymph Urvasi ; in the poem of The Seasons ; and in that 

 of The Messenger of Clouds (Megltaduta). This last poem 

 describes with admirable truth to nature the joy with which, 

 after long drought, the first appearance of a rising cloud is 

 hailed as the harbinger of the approaching season of rain. 

 The expression, " truth to nature," of which I have just made 

 use, can alone justify me in referring, in connection with the 

 Indian poem of Tlie Messenger of the Clouds, to a picture of 

 the beginning of the rainy season, which I sketched* in South 

 America, at a period when Kalidasa's Meghaduta was not 

 known to me even through the translation of Chezy. The 

 mysterious meteorological processes which take place in the 

 atmosphere in the formation of vapors, in the form of the 

 clouds, and in the luminous electric phenomena, are the same 

 between the tropics in both continents ; and the idealizing 

 art, whose province it is to exalt reality into a picture, will 

 lose none of its charm from the fact that the analyzing spirit 

 of observation of a later age may have succeeded in con* 

 firming the truthfulness of an ancient and simply graphic 

 delineation. 



We now turn from the East Arians or Brahminical In- 

 dians, and the marked bent of their minds toward the contem- 

 plation of the picturesque beauties of nature,t to the West 



which then first showed itself in Germany. I take pleasure in recall- 

 ing some admirable lines of Gothe's, which appeared in 17!)2: 

 " Willst du die Bliithe des friihen, die Friichte des spateren Jahres, 

 Willst du was reizt und entzuckt, willst du, was sattigt und nahrt. 

 Willst du den Himmel, die Erde mit einem Namen begreifen ; 

 Nenn' ich Sakontala, Dich, und so ist alles gesagt." 



The most recent German translation of this Indian drama is that by 

 Otto Bohtlingk (Bonn, 1842), from the important original text discovered 

 by Brockhaus. 



* Humboldt ( Ueber Steppen nnd Wusten), in the Ansichten der Natur, 

 2te Ausgabe, 1826, bd. i., s. 33-37. 



t In order to render more complete the small portion of the text 

 which belongs to Indian literature, and to enable me (as I did before 

 with relation to Greek and Roman literature) to indicate the different 

 works referred to, I will here introduce some notices on the more gen- 

 eral consideration of the love of nature evinced by Indian writers, and 

 kindly communicated to me in manuscript by Herr Theodor Gold- 

 stticker, a distinguished and philosophical scholar thoroughly versed in 

 Indian poetry: 



"Among all the influences affecting the intellectual development of 



