338 The Birth of Uma— [Juny, 
8. 
He, filling the hollows of all his brave trees 
Of rattling bamboo with a whistling wild breeze, 
That sounds from the covert of every deep den, 
And echoes through all, over forest and glen,— 
Might seem to be piping and leading along 
Heaven’s quire of musicians, commencing their song. 
9. 
His beauteous tall pines, when the elephants heal 
a A ES 
of corresponding with them, the bark is still extensively employed, as it was in 
Caliddsa’s time, for the fabrication of a very common kind of paper among the 
Hindus, as well as for the less poetical purpose of supplying what our countrymen 
in India call the snakes of their hookas. A fuller description of this tree may 
be seen in Dr. Wallich’s very valuable work, Plante Asiatic Rariores: to whom 
I am also indebted for a sigut of a frustum of its trunk brought by him from Nipal, 
and illustrating the above statement. 
The use of this birch paper in bearing erotic messages to the fair Vidyadhards 
of Indra’s heaven, which Calidasa thus oddly contrasts with the rough embrace of 
the wanton elephants, (the two states of the bark being singularly mixed together in 
the Sanscrit sentence) is curiously illustrated by the converse application, exhi- 
bited by our poet himself in his beautiful drama of Vitrama and Urvast, or the 
“ Hero and the Nymph :”’ where the celestial nymph Urvasi uses a leaf of the birch 
tree to convey her passion to a mortal prince. The leaf plucked in the forest, and 
hastily inscribed with a few elegant Pracrit lines, is dropped by the divine fair one 
in sight of the king’s confident, who bears it to his master. (Act. II, p. 33 of the 
Sanscrit edition, p. 86 of Wilson’s translation.) 
St. 8. He filling the hollows, &c.—The office ascribed to the sylvan and moun- 
tain deity Pan in the Homeric hymn to that god, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 
i. v. 707, of giving the first notions of music to mankind by blowing through reeds 
with the winds of heaven, and even instructing the immortals in the same art, (and 
as ‘the Orphic hymn pursues the idea, thussetting an example of the harmony of the 
heavens,— 
"EAOE pdkap, okipTntd, Tepidpome, cvvOpovos Spats, 
Aiyowedés, Barxeurd, dbirdvOeos, avTpodiarre, 
‘Apuoviny xéopmoro KpeKwy prdomalymove moATh. 
i.e. as some say, by the gamut of his syrinx answering to the seven planets,) is here 
ascribed to the gigantic Him4laya, with all the advantage that the far larger and 
more noisy reeds of the Indian forest give to the representation. Our poet has spoken 
elsewhere of the natural music of the bamboos, but in a more tranquil strain, and 
with no mention of the mountain leader of the band, or of his echoing caverns, in 
St. 58 of the Cloud Messenger, and in the Raghu-vansa, 2nd Canto, St. 12... 
St. 9. His beauteous tall pines, &c.—The WUE Sarala or Pinus longifolia, some-" 
times called the Cheer, which is the species of pine here mentioned, is of the most 
