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LETTERS OF TAGORE
11

winter in our minds, and when spring, we could provide ourselves with prose and poetry books accordingly.

The seasons of the mind, however, are not 6[1] but 52, like a pack of cards; and which one the whimsical player within us will turn up next there is no knowing. So I have an endless variety of books at hand from Nepalese Buddhistic literature to Shakespeare, the majority of which I shall probably not touch.

I am hardly ever without the old Vaishnava poets and the Sanskrit classics, but this time I left them at home and so as luck would have it wanted them all the more. The Meghaduta would have been the very thing while I was wandering about Puri and Khandagiri,—but there instead of the Meghaduta I had only Caird's Philosophical Essays!

(73)

Cuttack,
March: 1893.


If we begin to attach too much importance to the applause of Englishmen, we shall have to get rid of much that is good in us, and to accept much that is bad from them.

  1. The recognised seasons in Upper India are six: Spring, Summer, the Rains, Autumn, the Dews and Winter.