Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/122

keeping at a distance from me. But if I could show you my heart, you would find it green and young,—perhaps younger than some of you who are standing before me. And you would find, also, that I am childish enough to believe in things which the grown-up people of the modern age, with their superior wisdom, have become ashamed to own,—and even modern schoolboys also. That is to say, I believe in an ideal life. I believe that, in a little flower, there is a living power hidden in beauty which is more potent than a Maxim gun. I believe that in the bird’s notes Nature expresses herself with a force which is greater than that revealed in the deafening roar of the cannonade. I believe that there is an ideal hovering over the earth,—an ideal of that Paradise which is not the mere outcome of imagination, but the ultimate reality towards which all things are moving. I believe that this vision of Paradise is to be seen in the sunlight, and the green of the earth, in the flowing streams, in the beauty of spring time, and the repose of a winter morning. Everywhere in this earth the spirit of Paradise is awake and sending forth its voice. We are deaf to its call; we forget it; but the voice of eternity wells up like a mighty organ and touches the inner core