"
The king calls her words "honeyed falsehoods." Sakoontala buries her
face in her mantle and bursts into tears.
The tenderness of this scene, its grace and delicacy, are quite idyllic,
and worthy of the best ages of the pastoral drama. The ring is at
length restored to Dushyanta, having been found by a fisherman in the
belly of a carp. On its being restored to the king's finger, he is
overcome with a flood of recollection: he gives himself over to mourning
and forbids the celebration of the Spring festival. He admits that his
palsied heart had been slumbering, and that, now it is roused by
memories of his fawn-eyed love, he only wakes to agonies of remorse.
Meanwhile Sakoontala had been carried away like a celestial nymph to the
sacred grove of Kasyapa, far removed from earth in the upper air. The
king, being summoned by Indra to destroy the brood of giants,
descendants of Kalamemi, the monster of a hundred arms and heads,
reaches in the celestial car Indra, the grove where dwell his wife and
child, an heroic boy whom the hermits call Sarva-damana--the all-tamer.
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