his body like a ruby freshly cut." Soon after comes a long account, bristling with puns, of a disconsolate princess lying prostrate in the wood--"lost in the forest and in thought, bent upon death and the root of a tree, fallen upon calamity and her nurse's bosom, parted from her husband and happiness, burned with the fierce sunshine and the woes of widowhood, her mouth closed with silence as well as by her hand, and held fast by her companions as well as by grief. I saw her with her kindred and her graces all gone, her ears and her soul left bare, her ornaments and her aims abandoned, her bracelets and her hopes broken, her companions and the needle-like grass-spears clinging round her feet, her eye and her beloved fixed within her bosom, her sighs and her hair long, her limbs and her merits exhausted, her aged attendants and her streaming tears falling down at her feet," and so forth. CHAPTER XII LYRIC POETRY (Circa 400-1100 A.D.) Sanskrit lyrical poetry has not produced many works of any considerable length. But among these are included two of the most perfect creations of Kalidasa, a writer distinguished no less in this field than as an epic and a dramatic author. His lyrical talent is, indeed, also sufficiently prominent in his plays. Kalidasa's Meghaduta, or "Cloud Messenger," is a lyrical gem which won the admiration of Goethe. It consists of 115 stanzas composed in the Mandakranta metre of four lines of seventeen syllables. The theme is a message which an exile sends by a cloud to his wife dwelling far away. The idea is applied by Schiller in his Maria Stuart, where the captive Queen of Scots calls on the clouds as they fly southwards to greet the land of her youth (act iii. sc. 1). The exile is a Yaksha or attendant of Kubera, the god of wealth, who for neglect of his duty has been banished to the groves on the slopes of Ramagiri in Central India. Emaciated and melancholy, he sees, at the approach of the rainy season, a dark cloud moving northwards. The sight fills his heart with yearning, and impels him to address to the cloud a request to convey a message of hope to his wife in the remote Himalaya. In the first half of the poem the Yaksha describes with much power and beauty the various scenes the cloud must traverse on its northward course: Mount Amrakuta, on whose peak it will rest after quenching with showers the forest fires; the Narmada, winding at the foot of the Vindhya hills; the town of Vidiça (Bhilsa), and the stream of the Vetravati (Betwah); the city of Ujjayini (Ujjain) in the land of Avanti; the sacred region of Kurukshetra; the Ganges and the mountains from which she sprang, white with snowfields, till Alaka on Mount Kailasa is finally reached.