Darkly you sweep on, Eternal Fugitive, round whose bodiless rush stagnant space frets into eddying bubbles of light. Is your heart lost to the Lover calling you across his immeasurable loneliness? Is the aching urgency of your haste the sole reason why your tangled tresses break into stormy riot and pearls of fire roll along your path as from a broken necklace? Your fleeting steps kiss the dust of this world into sweetness, sweeping aside all... more...

SERVANT. Have mercy upon your servant, my queen!QUEEN. The assembly is over and my servants are all gone. Whydo you come at this late hour?SERVANT. When you have finished with others, that is my time.I come to ask what remains for your last servant to do.QUEEN. What can you expect when it is too late?SERVANT. Make me the gardener of your flower garden.QUEEN. What folly is this?SERVANT. I will give up my other work.I will throw my swords and... more...

INTRODUCTION It is at my persuasion that these poems are now published. The earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter made me very... more...

KALIDASA—HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS I Kalidasa probably lived in the fifth century of the Christian era. This date, approximate as it is, must yet be given with considerable hesitation, and is by no means certain. No truly biographical data are preserved about the author, who nevertheless enjoyed a great popularity during his life, and whom the Hindus have ever regarded as the greatest of Sanskrit poets. We are thus confronted with one of... more...

1 STRAY birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh. 2 O TROUPE of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words. 3 THE world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal. 4 IT is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom. 5 THE mighty desert is... more...