writer's quarters at Shanti Niketan: "I am writing to you sitting in my room on the second floor of this house; a swelling sea of foliage is seen through the open doors all around me, quivering at the touch of the early winter's breath and glistening in the sunshine." It is in this familiar guise that one would like best to imagine him, a poet who is able to renew for us the sense of life in its energy and its true orient, as did that older poet who wrote of it in the Upanishads:
"Whenever the sim rises and sets, shouts of Hurrah! arise and all beings come to life, and whoever knows this and thinks of the sim as divine will hear those happy shoutings."
Blake might have imagined that and St. Francis thought it, and it is a message that is welcome whenever it comes. It may come by the saints and it may come by the poets; and if in this book it is with the latter kind that Rabindranath Tagore is ranged, it is because, through his lyric power, he is most likely in the end to prove its messenger.
These pages, finally, owe a great deal to the
