As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said about this play _Chitra_. To indicate something of the nature of so perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform. Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the life and perform the activities of a man, with a man's hardness of frame and a man's directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan. "Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that a man was before me...." Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the year begins: _Chitra_ At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty I had heard from Arjuna;--drinking drop by drop the honey that I had stored during the long day. The history of my past life, like that of my former existences, was forgotten. I felt like a flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the humming of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the sky, bend its head, and at a breath give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment that has neither past nor future. _Vasanta_ (The God of Love) A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a morning. _Madana_ (The God of the Seasons) Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song. _Chitra_