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RABINDRANATH TAGORE
CH.

to effect the required transfiguration; and they appear to have brought about something like a revolution in the diction and the freer cadence of Bengali verse. Here, too, should be mentioned Rabindranath's work in another mode, his highly imaginative reconstruction, under the name of Vanu Sinha, of the loves of Radhika and Krishna on the banks of the Jumna, which has been likened to the reproduction of medieval Italian romance by Keats. Those who have followed the prose and verse of the movement from which it sprang, and know what Neo-Hinduism meant for the young poets of thirty years ago, can alone relate it for us to its period. But Navina Chandra Sen's Raivataka, which is the epic of the Hindu religious revival, is still a closed book to us in England. As for the Valmikir Jaya, or "The Three Forces" (physical, intellectual, and moral), of Haraprasada Shastri—"the most glorious phantasmagoria" in Indian literature, touched with the sublimity of the Himalayas,—it is to us only a name, remote as their heights. With the literary enthusiasms and romantic ideas that these works of his contemporaries recall ends the first, or Calcutta period, of his career.

The second period was spent away from cities,