Verse 22

¹⁶Ringed by a few cowherds, Baladeva and Janardana came into the arena, king, with the elephant's tusks for their weapons. ¹⁷To the wrestlers a thunderbolt; to men, the best of men; to the women, love itself in a body; to the cowherds, one of their own; to the wicked kings, the one who corrects them; to his own parents, a child; to the lord of the Bhojas, death; to the unknowing, the vast form; to yogins, what is finally real; to the Vrsnis, the god above their gods. So he was known as he came into the arena, and his elder brother with him. ¹⁸Seeing Kuvalayapida killed, and the two of them not to be beaten, Kamsa was shaken to the bottom of his mind, king.

¹⁹Those two great-armed ones shone as they came into the arena, in bright dress and ornaments and garlands and cloth, like two actors got up in the finest costume, throwing the minds of those who watched out of place by their brightness. ²⁰Looking at those two highest Persons, king, the people on the platforms, from the city and from the country, their eyes and their faces opening with the rush of gladness, drank in that face with their eyes and were not filled. ²¹Drinking him, as it were, with their eyes; licking him, as it were, with their tongues; smelling him, as it were, with their noses; folding him, as it were, in their arms.

²²And they told one another what they had seen and what they had heard, as though his beauty and his qualities, his sweetness and his boldness, had brought it all back to them.