Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/25

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SHANTINIKETAN
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because it was truly his by right. He would have needed no recommendation from me, but unfortunately he died young before he had time to fulfil his promise, leaving the record of his greatness only in the memory of his friends.

I cannot but conclude this preface of mine with an extract from my lecture about Shantiniketan where I have described his connection with the ashram.

“Fortunately for me, Satish Chandra Roy, a young student of great promise, who was getting ready for his B.A. degree, became attracted to my school and devoted his life to carrying out my idea. He was barely nineteen but he had a wonderful soul, living in a world of ideas, keenly responsive to all that was beautiful and great in the realm of nature and of the human mind. He was a poet who, if he had lived, would surely have taken his place among the immortals of world-literature, but he died when he was twenty, thus offering his service to our school only for the period of one short year. With him boys never felt that they were confined in the limits of a teaching class, they seemed to have their access to everywhere. They would go with him to the forest when in the spring the sal trees were in full blossom, and he would recite