NATURAL DESCRIPTIONS BY THE INDIANS. 405 



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

 n 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 (Meyliaduta). 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 The Messenger of tlie 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 vapours, in the form of the 

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

 between the tropics in both continents ; and the idealising art, 

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

 none of its charm from the fact that the analysing spirit of 

 observation of a later age may have succeeded in confirming 

 the truthfulness of an ancient and simply graphic delineation. 

 We now turn from the East Arians or Brahminical 



that of the appearance of Buddha, that is to say, prior to the middle of 

 the sixth century before Christ. (Burnouf, Bhagavata-Purana, t. i. 

 p. cxi. and cxviii.; Lassen, Ind. Altertliuniskunde, bd. i. s. 356 and 

 492.) George Forster, by the translation of Sakuntala, i. e., by his 

 elegant German translation of the English version of Sir William 

 Jones (1791) contributed very considerably to the enthusiasm for 

 Indian poetry which then first shewed itself in Germany. I take 

 pleasure in recalling some admirable lines of Gothe's, which appeared in 

 1792: 

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



Willst du was reizt nnd entziickt, willst du, was sattigt und nlihrt. 



Willst du den Himmcl, die Erde mit eineni 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 dis- 

 covered by Brockhaus. 



* Humboldt, (Ueber Steppen und W listen), in the Ansicliten der 

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



