until her form resembles the moon in its last quarter; her face is as pale as the moon at morning dawn.  Always both the lovers, though he be a king—­as he generally is—­and she a goddess, are diffident at first, fearing failure, even after the most unmistakable signs of fondness, in the betrayal of which the girls are anything but coy.  All these symptoms the poets prescribe as regularly as a physician makes out a prescription for an apothecary.

A peculiar stare—­which must be sidelong, not direct at the beloved—­is another conventional characteristic of Hindoo amorous fiction.  The gait becomes languid, the breathing difficult, the heart stops beating or is paralyzed with joy; the limbs or the whole body wither like flower-stalks after a frost; the mind is lamed, the memory weakened; cold shivers run down the limbs and fever shakes the body; the arms hang limp at the side, the breast heaves, words stick in the throat; pastimes no longer entertain; the perfumed Malayan wind crazes the mind; the eyelids are motionless, sighs give vent to anguish, which may end in a swoon, and if things take an unfavorable turn the thought of suicide is not distant.  Attempts to cure this ardent love are futile; Madhava tries snow, and moonlight, and camphor, and lotos roots, and pearls, and sandal oil rubbed on his skin, but all in vain.

THE HINDOO GOD OF LOVE

Quite as artificial and unsentimental as the notions of the Hindoos concerning the symptoms of love is their conception of their god of love, Kama, the husband of Lust.  His bow is made of sugar-cane, its string a row of bees, and his arrow-tips are red flower-buds.  Spring is his bosom friend, and he rides on a parrot or the sea-monster Makara.  He is also called Ananga—­the bodiless—­because Siwa once burned him up with the fire that flashed from his third eye for disturbing him in his devotions by awakening in him love for Parwati.  Sakuntala’s lover wails that Kama’s arrows are “not flowers, but hard as diamond.”  Agnimitra declares that the Creator made his beloved “the poison-steeped arrow of the God of Love;” and again, he says:  “The softest and the sharpest things are united in you, O Kama.”  Urvasi’s royal lover complains that his “heart is pierced by Kama’s arrow,” and in Malati and Madhava we are told that “a cruel god no doubt is Kama;” while No. 329 of Ilala’s love-poems declares: 

“The arrows of Kama are most diverse in their effects—­though made of flowers, very hard; though not coming into direct contact, insufferably hot; and though piercing, yet causing delight.”

Our familiarity with Greek and Roman literature has made us so accustomed to the idea of a Cupid awakening love by shooting arrows that we fail to realize how entirely fanciful, not to say whimsical, this conceit is.  It would be odd, indeed, if the Hindoo poets had happened on the same fancy as the Greeks of their