"It is broken, sir."
"What do you see there?"
"Not anything, sir."
The father said: "My son, that subtile essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists.
"Believe it, my son. That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it."
In many pages of this Moon-book we have the clear hints of the reality that underlies the child's half-comprehended belief in the nearness of Paradise and its identity with earth. The longing for the moon and the cloud-horses of the sky, or for the enchanted country depicted at night by the shadows of the lantern, is a clue to the child's faith.
Herbert Spencer saw in the appetites of the child only the insatiable hunger of the beast-innate at a lower stage. Rabindranath Tagore has learnt to divine in them the first putting forth of the desires which, being repeated in the other plane of intelligence, seek out the path to heaven itself. The signs indeed are clearly to be read in certain poems, and in that entitled "Benediction" they are given the effect of so many direct intimations:
