THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

V.. 7. Kalidasa's Characters295suddenly more beautiful and dear to us than they were before;the heart flows out towards birds and beasts and the very treesseem to be drawing us towards them with their branches as ifwith arms; the vain cloud and the senseless mountain are no longersenseless or empty, but friendly intelligences that have a voiceto our souls. Our own common thoughts, feelings, and passionshave also become suddenly fair to us, they have received thesanction of beauty. And then through the passion of delight andthe sense of life and of love in all beautiful objects we reach tothe Mighty Spirit behind them whom our soul recognizes no longeras an object of knowledge or of worship but as her lover to whomshe must fly, leaving her husband, the material life and bravingthe jeers and reprobation of the world for His sake. Thus by asingular paradox, one of those beautiful oxymorons of which theHindu temperament is full, we reach God through the senses,just as our ancestors did through the intellect and through theemotions; for in the Hindu mind all roads lead eventually to theRome of its longing, the dwelling of the Most High God. Onecan see how powerfully Kalidasa's poetry must have preparedthe national mind for the religion of the Puranas, for the worshipof Kali, our Mother and of Sri Krishna of Vrindavan, oursoul's Paramour. Here indeed lies his chief claim to rank withValmiki and Vyasa as one of our three national poets, in that hegathered the mind-life of the nation into his poetry at a greatand critical moment and helped it forward into the groove downwhich it must henceforth run.This method is applied with conspicuous beauty and successin the Urvasie. The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romanticconception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. Fromthe moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean,robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melodyfrom a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformedthe world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash andgleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beautyof the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the hauntingvoices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of thesoul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through hislines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor