THE HINDU POETS AND THE PRINCE OF WALES.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 595, 16 May 1876, Page 3

THE HINDU POETS AND THE PRINCE OF WALES.

(Fromthe Athenceum) It will b 3 remembered that before the Prince departed for India, it was jocularly said that he would be worshipped by the natives as a god, and even before he had fairly arrived in Bombay, it was found that Hindu poets was apostrophising him as an Avatar, or Incarnation of the Deity. But the force of Oriental folly could go, and has gone, further still. A document has been forwarded to London for publication, and will soon be printed, which in its way is a curiosity. It is a poem in honor of the Prince's visit to India, written l>y a Cauarese scholar. It would doubtless have been presented to the Priuce by the author personally had his lloyal Highness visited Mysore, as he first intended. A short specimen of what this poem is like may perhaps startle the religious reader. We give a free translation of the opening verses: 'Oh ! Invocation to the God, the Prince of Wales, What is the use of the rain and the sun ? What is the need of the land and the sea, the air and food ? Why should any other God be worshipped? God is here among us, and in him only will I believe. I have cast aside the Trimurti, If I ask for rain the Prince will give it; If I ask for the sun, the Prince will smile. Is he not omniscient, omnipresent, almighty, the essence of perfection ! I will breathe him and he shall be mv fool. Oh may J live in him, and be dissolved in his greatness, as the river is lost in the sea ! I have no need now to doubt in faith ; my new religion is one of sight and knowledge. I have seen the flower-face of my God !' And so on for a couple of hundred lines. Thus the Prince seems to have founded a new religion, without any desire or effort on his own part—the worship of himself. The best of it is that the writer of this production probably did not see ' the flower face of his God,' as the demons of cholera prevented his deity from going to Bangalore and Mysore. However, the new convert may, perhaps, make a pilgrimage to London to offer pooja to the Lord of the Three Plumes.