PREFACE.
in India, contemplate with additional interest and pleasure, from his previous acquaintance with the verses of Kalidasa.
Little is known of the literary history of the Megha Dtita. It is,
by common assent, attributed to Kalidasa, a celebrated poet, who is
reputed to have been one of the ornaments of the Court of Vikrama-
ditya, king of Ujayin, whose reign, used as a chronological epoch by
the Hindus, is placed 56 years before the Christian sera. There is no
reason to dispute the truth of these traditions. The poem undoubtedly
belongs to a classical period of Hindu Literature ; and that period,
there is reason to believe, did not long survive the first centuries of
Christianity. At a later date, the Poets were men of more scholarship
than imagination, and substituted an overwrought display of the
powers of the language for the unforced utterance of the dictates of
the feeling or the fancy. This is not the case with the Megha Duta ;
and although it is rather of a more sustained elevation of language
than other works attributed to the same author, particularly his
dramatic compositions, Sakuntala, and Vikrama and Urvasi, yet there
is a community of character in them, a similar fidelity to nature, a
like delicacy and tenderness of feeling, and the same felicity of
description, gracefulness of imagery, and elegance of expression, which
leave it sufficiently probable that they are the works of the same
master-hand. There are, indeed, in the Vikrama and Urvasi especially,
passages which call the Megha Duta to recollection ; and in one
place, where the deserted monarch inquires of the passing Cloud
whither Urvasf has fled, we have the germ of the perhaps later poem,
the Cloud Messenger. Of the other works attributed to Kalidasa,
the Ritu-sanhara, Raghuvansa, Malavikagnimitra, Kumara-sambhava,
Sringara-tilaka, Prasnottara-mala, Hasyamava, and Sruta-bodha, some
of them are certainly not of his composition.
The Text of the Megha Duta has been the subject of very industrious
