he saw it. The late Professor Cowell termed him "the Crabbe of Bengal," who loved his native village none the less because he was exiled from it under the Muhamedan tyranny. "All honest men," he said, "live in Damunya; in its southern quarter live the poets and the good scholars. The great divine Siva himself in his grace has been to Damunya." As for its river, Ratnanu, its water is dear to him as that of the Ganges itself. It was by drinking it, he says, that he became endowed with poetry. The true ichor of Gauda ran indeed in his veins. Wherever he may place his scenes, in Siva's heaven, or India or Ceylon, said Professor Cowell, "he never loses sight of Bengal."
Water means so much in India; every Bengal poet makes much of his native stream or river. Wherever and whenever Nimai saw a river flowing by him he heard in it the rustling and murmuring of the Jumna which he associated with Krishna. As for the poems on Ganga Devi, the river-goddess, the spirit of the Ganges, they tell us how precious she was to the Gaur-born Hindoo. "When dying," says Chanda Sen, "we must have at least a drop of Ganges water, or we feel disconsolate at the hour of
