imself equally at home in a
palace and in a wilderness. I know not with whom to compare him in
this; even Shakespeare, for all his magical insight into natural
beauty, is primarily a poet of the human heart. That can hardly be
said of Kalidasa, nor can it be said that he is primarily a poet of
natural beauty. The two characters unite in him, it might almost be
said, chemically. The matter which I am clumsily endeavouring to make
plain is beautifully epitomised in _The Cloud-Messenger_. The former
half is a description of external nature, yet interwoven with human
feeling; the latter half is a picture of a human heart, yet the
picture is framed in natural beauty. So exquisitely is the thing done
that none can say which half is superior. Of those who read this
perfect poem in the original text, some are more moved by the one,
some by the other. Kalidasa understood in the fifth century what
Europe did not learn until the nineteenth, and even now comprehends
only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man, that man
reaches his full stature only as he realises the dignity and worth of
life that is not human.

That Kalidasa seized this truth is a magnificent tribute to his
intellectual power, a quality quite as necessary to great poetry as
perfection of form. Poetical fluency is not rare; intellectual grasp
is not very uncommon: but the combination has not been found perhaps
more than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed
this harmonious combination, Kalidasa ranks not with Anacreon and
Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Vergil, Milton.

He would doubtless have been somewhat bewildered by Wordsworth's
gospel of nature. "The world is too much with us," we can fancy him
repeating. "How can the world, the beautiful human world, be too much
with us? How can sympathy with one form of life do other than vivify
our sympathy with other forms of life?"

It remains to say what can be said in a foreign language of Kalidasa's
style. We have seen that he had a formal and systematic education; in
this respect he is rather to be compared with Milton and Tennyson than
with Shakespeare or Burns. He was completely master of his learning.
In an age and a country which reprobated carelessness but were
tolerant of pedantry, he held the scales with a wonderfully even hand,
never heedless and never indulging in the elaborate trifling with
Sanskrit diction which repels the reader from much of Indian
literature. It