पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/१४६

114 BHĀRAVI, BHATTI, KUMĀRADĀSA, AND MAGHA 'As her hand, full of water, was laughingly grasped by her lover, 'twas her kindly girdle which the water had stiffened that saved from falling the garment of the loving maiden, for the knot that held it had slipped." His play of fancy is constant and extensive; he acquired the style of parasol-Bhāravi from his comparison (v. 39) of the lotus dust driven by the winds to the goddess Lakşmi mirrored in a golden parasol. Still less attrac- tive to our taste is a simile ¹ based on the mute letter (anubandha) between ste and ending in grammar. Bharavi, however, is guilty of errors of taste from which Kāli- dāsa is free. Especially in Canto xv he sets himself to try tours de force of the most foolish kind, redolent of the excesses of the Alexandrian poets. Thus one verse has the first and third, second and fourth lines identical; in another all four are identical ; one has practically only c and r, another only the letters s, f, y, and 7; in other stanzas each line reads backwards the same way as the next, or the whole stanza read backwards gives the next; one stanza has three senses; two no labial letters; or each verse can be read backwards and forwards unchanged. One sample must serve: na nonanunno nunnono nănā nānānanā nanu nunno 'nunno nanunneno nānenā nunnanunnanut. 'No man is he who is wounded by a low man; no man is the man who wounds a low man, o ye of diverse aspect; the wounded is not wounded if his master is unwounded; not guiltless is he who wounds one sore wounded.' But at least he eschews long compounds, and, taken all in all, is not essentially obscure. Bharavi sets a bad example in his fondness for showing his skill in grammar, and he is in many ways the beginner of manner- isms in the later poets. The ridiculously frequent use of the root tan begins with him; he is fond of passive perfect forms, in- cluding the impersonal use; the adverbial use of prepositional compounds is a favourite form of his; many of Pāṇini's rules of rare type 3 are illustrated by him, as ças with double accusative, 1 x111. 19; cf. xvii. 6. Cf. Māgha, i. 47, 95, 112; x. 15; xiv. 66; xvi. 80; xix. 75. 2 Walter, Indica, ini. 34 f. 3 Cappeller, pp. 153 ff. On the perfect cf. Renon, La valeur du parfait, p. 87.