and in a way live by it, making it a part of their daily existence. And when we try to understand something of the fervour and naturalness and spontaneous melody that mark The Gardener and Gitanjali, we see what they gained by the love of song and the belief in inspiration fostered among the people of Bengal. Without Chaitanya and such lives as the "Chaitanya Mangal," the Bengal poets of to-day would not be what they are. The living usage of the art—the use of songs actually sung and declaimed, not merely read in the book—has remained a tradition among them, and made poetry not only a welcome, but an inalienable thing.
The author of Folk-songs from the Panjab quotes a saying to the effect that music is born in Bengal, grows up in Oudh, grows old in the Panjab, and dies in Kashmir; and as we look into the records of the various Indian tongues and races, we discern what seems to be the working of a finer spirit of song and lyric life in that region of the Ganges over which Nimāi wandered. If there is a congenial folk-element at work which saves poetry there from becoming a victim to the dark distemper which verse must always dread,—begotten in the literary
