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Before any name, a radiance. Before the heart can say who She is, it can only say what it holds: kim api hema-gauraṁ mahaḥ, some golden light, some splendor too sweet to be spoken. This is how true vision arrives. You do not first reason your way to Rādhā and then admire Her; She breaks upon the inner eye as light, and only afterward does the heart, steadied, begin to trace the features within the glow. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes the law of it in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi: rūpaṁ kim apy anirvācyaṁ tanor mādhuryam ucyate, when a body is beautiful past all telling, that very unsayability is called mādhurya, sweetness. So the speaker does not stammer from poverty of words. He stammers because he stands in the presence of the indescribable, and the tradition says plainly that this can be known only by the advanced heart, tasted and never explained.

Now let the light gather into form. Look first at Her eyes: madāruṇa-vilocanam, eyes flushed reddish at their corners. Do not mistake the redness. It is not wine, O seeker, it is mada of another order, the intoxication of love itself, amorous rapture brimming until it tints the very eyes. And see how Her whole body shines: kanaka-darpaka-mocanam, a luster that strips gold of its pride. The tradition reads the cause tenderly: this glow gushes from Her because She knows She has pleased Her beloved, and joy of that kind cannot be hidden; it pours out as light, and before it the proud sheen of refined gold simply gives up its boast.

Then comes Her unending eagerness: mahā-praṇaya-mādhurī-rasa-vilāsa-nityotsukam, She who is always, nitya, athirst for the sweetest flavor of great loving pastimes. This is no idle longing. Śrīpāda realizes this when in vision he beholds the divine Couple locked in a close embrace, and there Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī opens the deep word praṇaya for us: praṇaya is the love that makes the two Lovers feel no difference between them, a oneness of mind and heart and body and intelligence. She is eager for that, ever new in wanting it.

And She is young: lasan-nava-vayaḥ-śriyā, lovely with the splendor of ever-fresh tender age; and playful past describing: lalita-bhaṅgi-līlāmayam, made all of graceful gesture and sport. When Śrīpāda sees Her so, the tradition has him cry out the line itself, her tender age so beautiful, her playful movements so lovely. And again Rūpa Gosvāmī gives the name for it in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi: vinyāsa-bhaṅgi-raṅgānāṁ bhrū-vilāsa-manoharā, when a delicate girl makes such playful turns of Her limbs and such enchanting play of the eyebrows, that ornament of feeling is called lalita. And the maidservant sees these movements not once but woven through every one of Svāminī's pastimes.

Why does it all increase without end? Because, the tradition teaches, when the Couple draw close They pour into each other oceans of sweetness, each lifting the other higher, and the hearts of the maidservants are caught on those waves and carried in every direction. Kṛṣṇa is sweetness Himself, and yet, the tradition marvels, Vṛṣabhānu's daughter drowns even Him in the ocean of Her own sweetness. The Caitanya-caritāmṛta puts the wonder in His own mouth: though the mirror of Rādhā's love is already spotless, its clearness grows clearer every moment; His sweetness has no room left to grow, yet before that mirror it keeps assuming forever new forms; His sweetness and Her love thus raise each other endlessly, and neither is ever the loser. Two mirrors face to face, and the brightness never settles.

And the one who beholds this is not left unchanged. Rūpa Gosvāmī sets it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that rasa is what transcends every ordinary turn of human thought, what astonishes utterly, what is tasted in hearts kindled by viśuddha-sattva, pure goodness; and there too he writes that rati takes its shelter in sweetness, and so reveals Kṛṣṇa, and when that is felt, rati itself swells again. So Śrīpāda, in his kiṅkarī form, his maidservant self, has been given the great fortune of tasting this sweetness, and the taste has widened the very ocean of his prema. The seeing feeds the love, and the love deepens the seeing.

Hear, last, how the form is gathered up in praise. Sarasvatī sings Her in the keli-kuñja under many names: Gorocanā of the vermilion glow and Gaurī of the golden, Premamayī who is made of love, Pramodinī who gives delight, Paramā Sundarī the most beautiful of all; Rāi Kamalinī, the lotus-Rādhā, whose red love-drunk eyes enchant even Cupid, madana-mohinī, and shame the pride of gold; the Navīnā Nāgarī, ever-young heroine forever eager for sweet love-play; She who is rightly called devī. And the singer ends as the verse ends: hṛdā tad aham udvahe, I keep this opulent, youthful, golden form forever in my heart and mind. O Rādhe, golden light no word can hold, dwell so in this heart as well.