to turn the tide had
come. The young Sikhandin had been born a woman, and changed
afterwards by the Gods into a man. Let Sikhandin fight in the
forefront of the battle, and the Pandavas would win, and Bhishma
be slain.--Arjuna, who loved Bhishma as dearly as Bhishma loved
him and his brothers, protested; but Krishna announced that
Bhishma was so doomed to die, and on the following day; a fate
decreed, and righteously to be brought about by the stratagem.
So it happened:

"Bhishma viewed the Pandav forces with a calm unmoving face;
Saw not Arjun's bow Gandiva, saw not Bhima's mighty mace;
Smiled to see the young Sikhandin rushing to the battle's
fore
Like the white foam on the billow when the mighty storm
winds roar;
Thought upon the word he plighted, and the oath that he had
sworn,
Dropt his arms before the warrior that was, but a woman
born;"

--and so, was slain.... and the chiefs of both armies gathered
round and mourned for him.--Now it seems to me that the poets who
viewed sympathetically the magnanimity of Bhishma, which meets
you on the plane of simple human action and character, would not
have viewed sympathetically, or perhaps conceived, the strategem
advised by Krishna,--which you have to meet, to find it acceptable,
on the planes of metaphysics and symbolism.

There is a quality in it you do not find in the _Illiad._ Greek
and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their
combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable
self-knowledge: each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of
hexameters, the weak points in his opponent's character. They
are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir
their enthusiasm highly;--but as to faults, neither takes thought
for his own; each concentrates on the other's; and a war of
words is the appetiser for the coming banquet of deeds. Before
fighting Hector, Achilles reviled him; and having killed him,
dragged his corpse shamefully round the walls of Troy. But
Bhishma, in his victorious career, has nothing worse to cry to
his enemies than--_Valiant are ye, noble princes!_ and if you
think of it on the unsymbolic plane, there is a certain nobility
in the Despondency of Arjuna in the _Bhagavad-Gita._

Says the _Encyclopaedia Brittanica:_

"To characterize the Indian Epics in a single word: though often
disfigured by grotesque fancies and wild exaggera