death." Fancy an Englishman languishing for a drop of Thames water on his death-bed!
So much one is tempted to say about Rabindranath Tagore's native region, because alike in reading his poems and in talking to him about the things that have most affected his imagination, one realises that he owed much of his endowment to his early years and surroundings there. When he pictures the beauty of the earth it is with a sky like that whose blue radiance filled Radha with ecstasy stretched over its trees and pools and cow pastures. When he looks back for those associations which knit up one's feeling about life and its pleasantness and humnan continuity, it is with the music of the ragas in songs like those of Rama Ra Sada that he finds them conditioned. And as for the language in which they are uttered, we have to talk with one whose mother-tongue it is to appreciate its full resource, and those elements and qualities in it which have made it pliant under the lyric spell. We test a language by its elasticity, its response to rhythm, by the kindness with which it looks upon the figurative desires of the child and the poet. In these essentials, Bengali proves its right to a
