"chvsp10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beames John)

the corner of her robe: she sits still for a while, then rises with a
start, her ornaments fall with a clang. Youthful in age, of royal
descent, and a chaste maiden to boot: what does she desire, (why) does
her longing increase? I cannot understand her motives: from her
conduct, this I conceive, she has raised her hand to the moon:
[Footnote: She has formed some extravagant desire.] Cha.n.di Das says
with respect she has fallen into the snare of the black one
(K.rish.na)."

This poem vividly expresses the first symptoms of love dawning in the
girl's heart, and from a religious point of view the first awakenings
of consciousness of divine love in the soul. It is difficult for the
European mind, trained to draw a broad distinction between the love of
God and love for another human being, to enter into a state of feeling
in which the earthly and sensual is made a type of the heavenly and
spiritual, but a large-souled charity may be perhaps able to admit that
by this process, strange though it be to its own habits and
experiences, there may have been some improvement wrought in the inner
life of men brought up in other schools of thought; and my own
experience, now of fourteen years standing, enables me to say that
Vaish.navism does, in spite of, or perhaps in virtue of, its peculiar
_modus operandi_, work a change for the better on those who come
under its influence.

Two more hymns on the same subject follow, and in No. 5 Radha herself
breaks silence.

"In the kadamba grove what man is (that) standing? What sort of word
coming is this: the plough of whose meaning has penetrated startlingly
the path of hearing? With a hint of union, with its manner of
penetrating making one well-nigh mad: My mind is agitated, it cannot
be still, streams flow from my eyes: I know not what manner of man it
is who utters such words: I see him not, my heart is perturbed, I
cannot stay in the house: My soul rests not, it flutters to and fro in
hope of seeing him: When she sees him, she will find her soul, quoth
Urdbab Das."

I have left myself no space to finish this Pallab, or to make remarks
on the peculiarities of the language, which in the older masters would
more properly be called old Maithila than Bengali. It is nearly
identical with the language still spoken in Tirhut, the ancient
Mithili, and in Munger and Bhagalpur, the ancient Magadha, than modern
Bengali. As the Aryan race grew and multiplied it naturally poured out
its surplus population in Bengal, and it is not only philologically
obvious that Bengali is nothing more than a further, and very modern
development of the extreme eastern dialect of Hindi. All these
considerations, however, I hope still further to develop at some future
time.