Trees shed their flowers, the peacock-dances ended,
    The grasses dropped from mouths of feeding deer,
  As if the universal forest blended
    Its tears with hers, and shared her woeful fear.

While she laments thus piteously, she is discovered by the poet-sage Valmiki, who consoles her with tender and beautiful words, and conducts her to his hermitage, where she awaits the time of her confinement.  Meanwhile Rama leads a dreary life, finding duty but a cold comforter.  He makes a golden statue of his wife, and will not look at other women.

Fifteenth canto.  Rama goes to heaven.—­The canto opens with a rather long description of a fight between Rama’s youngest brother and a giant.  On the journey to meet the giant, Shatrughna spends a night in Valmiki’s hermitage, and that very night Sita gives birth to twin sons.  Valmiki gives them the names Kusha and Lava, and when they grow out of childhood he teaches them his own composition, the Ramayana, “the sweet story of Rama,” “the first path shown to poets.”  At this time the young son of a Brahman dies in the capital, and the father laments at the king’s gate, for he believes that the king is unworthy, else heaven would not send death prematurely.  Rama is roused to stamp out evil-doing in the kingdom, whereupon the dead boy comes to life.  The king then feels that his task on earth is nearly done, and prepares to celebrate the great horse-sacrifice.[4]

At this sacrifice appear the two youths Kusha and Lava, who sing the epic of Rama’s deeds in the presence of Rama himself.  The father perceives their likeness to himself, then learns that they are indeed his children, whom he has never seen.  Thereupon Sita is brought forward by the poet-sage Valmiki and in the presence of her husband and her detractors establishes her constant purity in a terrible fashion.

  “If I am faithful to my lord
  In thought, in action, and in word,
  I pray that Earth who bears us all
  May bid me in her bosom fall.”

  The faithful wife no sooner spoke
  Than earth divided, and there broke
  From deep within a flashing light
  That flamed like lightning, blinding-bright.

  And, seated on a splendid throne
  Upheld by serpents’ hoods alone,
  The goddess Earth rose visibly,
  And she was girded with the sea.

  Sita was clasped in her embrace,
  While still she gazed on Rama’s face: 
  He cried aloud in wild despair;
  She sank, and left him standing there.

Rama then establishes his brothers, sons, and nephews in different cities of the kingdom, buries the three queens of his father, and awaits death.  He has not long to wait; Death comes, wearing a hermit’s garb, asks for a private interview, and threatens any who shall disturb their conference.  Lakshmana disturbs them, and so dies before Rama.  Then Rama is translated.

Cantos sixteen to nineteen form the third division of the epic, and treat of Rama’s descendants.  The interest wanes, for the great hero is gone.