A History of Sanskrit Literature c9.s1.10

c9.s1.10

In yet another sphere such heightening of style must have been striven after. The Vedic poets, who can compare¹ the goddess Dawn to a fair dancer, to a maiden who unveils her bosom to a lover, cannot have been incapable of producing love poetry for secular use. Nor is it doubtful that it was the early writers of the love lyric who enriched Sanskrit with a vast abundance of elaborate metres; for the flow of epic narrative such metrical forms were wholly unsuited; on the other hand, the limited theme of love demanded variety of expression if it were to be worthily developed. The gnomic utterance of which the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* has preserved some Vedic specimens naturally shared in the cultivation of the lyric, and the elaboration of verse doubtless reacted on prose style, inducing writers to seek to reproduce in that medium something of the elegance after which poets now habitually strove. There is, then, no justification for presuming a breach in literary continuity, and, despite the fact that so much has perished, we have indisputable proofs of the active cultivation of Sanskrit literature during the period from 200 B. C. to A. D. 200, when on one theory it had not yet come into being, and secular literature was composed in Prākrit.