cribes a tour about the whole of
India and even into regions which are beyond the borders of a narrowly
measured India. It is hard to believe that Kalidasa had not himself
made such a "grand tour"; so much of truth there may be in the
tradition which sends him on a pilgrimage to Southern India. The
thirteenth canto of the same epic and _The Cloud-Messenger_ also
describe long journeys over India, for the most part through regions
far from Ujjain. It is the mountains which impress him most deeply.
His works are full of the Himalayas. Apart from his earliest drama
and the slight poem called _The Seasons_, there is not one of them
which is not fairly redolent of mountains. One, _The Birth of the
War-god_, might be said to be all mountains. Nor was it only Himalayan
grandeur and sublimity which attracted him; for, as a Hindu critic has
acutely observed, he is the only Sanskrit poet who has described a
certain flower that grows in Kashmir. The sea interested him less. To
him, as to most Hindus, the ocean was a beautiful, terrible barrier,
not a highway to adventure. The "sea-belted earth" of which Kalidasa
speaks means to him the mainland of India.

Another conclusion that may be certainly drawn from Kalidasa's writing
is this, that he was a man of sound and rather extensive education. He
was not indeed a prodigy of learning, like Bhavabhuti in his own
country or Milton in England, yet no man could write as he did without
hard and intelligent study. To begin with, he had a minutely accurate
knowledge of the Sanskrit language, at a time when Sanskrit was to
some extent an artificial tongue. Somewhat too much stress is often
laid upon this point, as if the writers of the classical period in
India were composing in a foreign language. Every writer, especially
every poet, composing in any language, writes in what may be called a
strange idiom; that is, he does not write as he talks. Yet it is true
that the gap between written language and vernacular was wider in
Kalidasa's day than it has often been. The Hindus themselves regard
twelve years' study as requisite for the mastery of the "chief of all
sciences, the science of grammar." That Kalidasa had mastered this
science his works bear abundant witness.

He likewise mastered the works on rhetoric and dramatic
theory--subjects which Hindu savants have treated with great, if
sometimes hair-splitting, ingenuity. The profound and subtle systems
of philosophy were also possessed by