n so
that there will be no morning for him."

At first sight the most surprising and important of Hala's seven
hundred poems seems to be No. 567:

"Only over me, the iron-hearted, thunder, O cloud, and
with all your might; be sure that you do not kill my
poor one with the hanging locks."

Here, for once, we have the idea of self-sacrifice--only the idea, it
is true, and not the act; but it indicates a very exceptional and
exalted state for a Hindoo even to think of such a thing. The
self-reproach of "iron-hearted" tells us, however, that the man has
been behaving selfishly and cruelly toward his sweetheart or wife, and
is feeling sorry for a moment. In such moments a Hindoo not
infrequently becomes human, especially if he expects new favors of the
maltreated woman, which she is only too willing to grant:

No. 85: "While with the breath of his mouth he cooled
one of my hands, swollen from the effect of his blow, I
put the other one laughingly around his neck."

No. 191: "By untangling the hair of her prostrate lover
from the notches of her spangles in which it had been
caught, she shows him that her heart has ceased to be
sulky."

References to such prostrations to secure forgiveness for inconstancy
or cruelty are frequent in Hindoo poems and dramas, and it is needless
to say that they are a very different thing from the disinterested
prostrations and homage of modern gallantry. True gallantry being one
of the altruistic ingredients of love, it would be useless to seek for
it among the Hindoos. Not so with hyperbole, which being simply a
magnifying of one's own sensations and an expression of extravagant
feeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well as
of sentimental love. The eager desire for a girl's favor makes her
breath and all her attributes seem delicious not only to man but to
inanimate things. The following, with the finishing touches applied by
the German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closely
than any other of Hala's songs:

No. 13: "O you who are skilled in cooking! Do not be
angry (that the fire fails to burn). The fire does not
burn, smokes only, in order to drink in (long) the
breath of (your) mouth, perfumed like red patela
blossoms."

In the use of hyperbole it is very difficult to avoid the step from
the sublime to the ridiculous. The author of No. 153 had a happy
though