music flows freely because there are eager listeners waiting to accept and to rejoice in his song; and this we discover, as we look back into the history of Bengali literature, comes of the propitious custom of the country.
We must go back a long way, to a time between Chaucer and Shakespeare, to realise the true anticipator of Gitanjali in the figure of Nimāi, otherwise called Chaitanya Deva. He lived at one time not far from Bolpur, where Rabindranath Tagore has his home. No one could have told in Nimāi's boyhood that he was to grow up into a poet; for he was the incorrigible imp of his village, with a dash in him of that uncanny prescience which sometimes exists in the fool of nature and the son of the wild. When the pious Brahmins, after their sacred bath, closed their eyes and prayed before the small figures of their gods, Nimāi would creep up stealthily and carry off their images; or he would collect the thorny seeds of the Okra plant and scatter them on the flowing hair of the little girls that went to bathe. Again he would shock his parents by stepping in among the tabooed and forbidden things which a Brahmin must not touch; and, when they admonished him, his reply
