and then his youngest son. He was on the verge, too, of his fortieth year—a time when a man needs to gather his own folk about him. A premonition of trouble had come to him not many months before, when he had given up his stewardship at Shilaida.
"He seemed," says his biographer, "to anticipate some vast sorrow and change, for which these quiet unbroken years in the country had been a solemn preparation."
The outcome of the restlessness that seized upon him was a determination to do something, while his energies still held good, for the new generation. Hence the idea of the small republic at Shanti Niketan. In the midst of the work needed to initiate the project, his troubles came fast upon him; the book that expresses them and their dire effect is Gitanjali, the book by which we first learnt to know him in England. One set of lyrics in especial—Nos. 83 to 93—marks the probation that seemed to teach him the second deliverance of which the Upanishads speak.
"This death-time," he said, "was a blessing to me. I had through it all, day after day, such a sense of fulfilment, of completion, as if nothing were lost. I felt that if even a single atom in
