?

As he sits by the side of the stream, he asks whence comes its charm:

Whilst gazing on the stream, whose new swollen waters
Yet turbid flow, what strange imaginings
Possess my soul and fill it with delight.
The rippling wave is like her aching brow;
The fluttering line of storks, her timid tongue;
The foaming spray, her white loose floating vest;
And this meandering course the current tracks
Her undulating gait.

Then he sees a creeper without flowers, and a strange attraction
impels him to embrace it, for its likeness to his lost love:

Vine of the wilderness, behold
A lone heartbroken wretch in me,
Who dreams in his embrace to fold
His love, as wild he clings to thee.

Thereupon the creeper transforms itself into Urwasi.

In Kalidasa's _Sakuntala_, too, when the pretty girls are watering
the flowers in the garden, Sakuntala says: 'It is not only in
obedience to our father that I thus employ myself. I really feel the
affection of a sister for these young plants.' Taking it for granted
that the mango tree has the same feeling for herself, she cries: 'Yon
Amra tree, my friends, points with the fingers of its leaves, which
the gale gently agitates, and seems inclined to whisper some secret';
and with maiden shyness, attributing her own thoughts about love to
the plants, one of her comrades says: 'See, my Sakuntala, how yon
fresh Mallica which you have surnamed Vanadosini or Delight of the
Grove, has chosen the sweet Amra for her bridegroom....'

'How charming is the season, when the nuptials even of plants are
thus publicly celebrated!'--and elsewhere:

'Here is a plant, Sakuntala, which you have forgotten.' Sakuntala:
'Then I shall forget myself.'

Birds,[2] clouds, and waves are messengers of love; all Nature
grieves at the separation of lovers. When Sakuntala is leaving her
forest, one of her friends says: 'Mark the affliction of the forest
itself when the time of your departure approaches!

'The female antelope browses no more on the collected Cusa grass, and
the pea-hen ceases to dance on the lawn; the very plants of the
grove, whose pale leaves fall on the ground, lose their strength and
their beauty.'

The poems of India, especially those devoted to descriptions of
Nature, abound in such bold, picturesque personifications, which are
touching, despite their extravagance, through their intense sympathy
with Nature. They shew the Hindoo attitude toward Nature in general,
a