ently no strain of passion. So it is with the music of these songs: there is a sighing cadence in some of the most passionate stanzas, as if the music turned to the wind and the streams to find an accompaniment for the rhythm of the words, born of the desire of young lovers. Take the twenty-ninth song in this cycle. It uses a motive which has been used again and again in the love-songs of other countries—in the aubades of Provence, the folk-songs of Tuscany, the Elizabethan lyrics and the songs of the English lutanists. There is no note in it which has not been used before, but in its very simplicity it is affecting, for it runs to love's perennial melody. One has only to add to its words the minor strain of the Bengali tune, rising and falling and taking breath at the pause before the final cadence, in order to fulfil the measure of a song, seemingly artless, but wildly complete. Out of such artlessness it is that the lyric art is born.
One is driven to insist on the part that music takes in the composition of these songs, because, unless their author is realised as a musician, one loses touch with the real spring of his verse. Indian music, however, is more naïve in its companionship with poetry than ours.
