more black. An illiterate Vaishnava devotee was playing on a lute made of a long gourd and singing to it, 'Dark is the night and thick are the clouds, how could you, my love, come by the path on such a night? There is the garden. I see him in the rain, and my heart breaks at the sight.' The poet ends by saying that 'the story of this love will gladden the world'; but, as the old man sang, his voice was fairly choked with tears. When asked why he wept, he said it was because of the song. Thereupon he was told that it was only an ordinary love-song, with nothing in it to cause such feeling. But he did not so consider it. He replied, 'I am full of sin. My soul is covered with darkness. In my deep distress I beckoned the merciful God to come to me, and he came, and I found him waiting at the gate of my house.' The thought of his mercy choked my voice, 'Dark is the night, and thick are the clouds, how could you, my love, come by the path on such a night?'"
Tears still dropped from the eyes of the old man as his fingers played on the lute, and he hummed mournfully, "Dark is the night and thick are the clouds."
To those who read Rabindranath's poems in the original, the break, such as it is, between the moods of Gitanjali and The Gardener hardly exists in the same degree. In these books the reader has the essence of a much larger body of verse, representing every mood and every stage of the poet's history; and in their pages the
