reduced to mere shadow creations:  beautiful as arabesques, delicate as a piece of ivory carving, tinted like the flat profiles of an Oriental fan or the pattern of a porcelain vase, but deficient in robustness and vigorous coloring.  Humanity is absolutely dwarfed and its powers rendered inoperative by the crowd of supernatural creatures that control its destiny.  Even in the “Tempest” of Shakespeare, in which the supernatural plays a greater part than in any other English drama, the strength and nobility of human character are allowed full play—­and man in his fortitude, in his intellect and will, even more than in his emotions, keeps full possession of the stage, and imparts a reality to every scene which makes the wildest flight of fancy bear a real relation to the common experiences of human life.

The “Sakoontala” is divided into seven acts, and is a mixture of prose and verse;—­each character rising in the intensity of emotional utterance into bursts of lyric poetry.  The first act introduces the King of India, Dushyanta, armed with bow and arrows, in a chariot with his driver.  They are passing through a forest in pursuit of a black antelope, which they fail to overtake before the voice of some hermit forbids them to slay the creature as it belongs to the hermitage.  The king piously desists and reaches the hermitage of the great saint Kanwa, who has left his companions in charge of his foster-daughter, Sakoontala, while he is bound on a pilgrimage.  Following these hermits the king finds himself within the precincts of a sacred grove, where rice is strewn on the ground to feed the parrots that nest in the hollow trunks, and where the unterrified antelopes do not start at the human voice.  The king stops his chariot and alights, so as not to disturb the dwellers in the holy wood.  He feels a sudden throb in his right arm, which augurs happy love, and sees hermit maidens approaching to sprinkle the young shrubs, with watering-pots suited to their strength.  The forms of these hermit maidens eclipse those found in queenly halls, as the luxuriance of forest vines excels the trim vineyards of cultivation.  Amongst these maidens the king, concealed by the trees, observes Sakoontala, dressed in the bark garment of a hermit—­like a blooming bud enclosed within a sheath of yellow leaves.  When she stands by the kesara-tree, the king is impressed by her beauty, and regrets that she is, if of a purely Brahmanic origin, forbidden to marry one of the warrior class, even though he be a king.  A very pretty description is given of the pursuit of Sakoontala by a bee which her sprinkling has startled from a jasmine flower.  From this bee she is rescued by the king, and is dismayed to find that the sight of the stranger affects her with an emotion unsuited to the holy grove.  She hurries off with her two companions, but as she goes she declares that a prickly kusa-grass has stung her foot; a kuruvaka-bush has caught her garment, and while her companions disentangle it, she takes a long look at the king, who confesses that he cannot turn his mind from Sakoontala.  This is the opening episode of their love.