motives. There is, upon an ultimate analysis, but one incentive, but one sanction, in conduct, and that is feebly expressed by the word 'love.' Only the thought of others makes life tolerable to those who think at all; without companionship of some kind even the purest pleasures quickly pall; without love of some sort even the flowers lose their freshness for us, the colours fade from the brightest landscape, and the taste of life eludes us.

For some, perhaps for most, the companionship of men and women is all-engrossing, and the very frequency of affection obscures from them the source of their happiness; yet in the vast solitude of the hills, or by the side of some swift river on the purple moors, such may, at times, faintly perceive how it really goes with them and know the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the many.' Within the heart of the friend who walks beside us we discern, however dimly, that inseparable companion; or, perhaps, the formless fragrance of the wind on the heath' awakens within us an unspeakable sense of well-being.

These flashes of enlightenment that visit most of us so graciously at times die all too quickly; God slips back again into the heaven that theology has made for Him. We see things and people separately and lose our sense of their connexion in Him. But the lonely man who, somehow, just misses the right environment and always feels a little shy in such human fellowship as he may find, takes a perpetual consolation from this 'inarticulate friendliness of things,' as Thoreau once called it. The sense of the abiding presence of that beautiful playmate sustains within him the social feeling which is the source of our finest actions, and saves him from that madness of misanthropy by which men are sometimes assailed when disappointed deeply in some human relationship. Religion has ever emphasised the value of solitude in throwing us back upon God. Such was the way of the hermits and monks, but the dangers of that way have closed it to all but a few. There remains the way of the mystic and the poet; for every poet is potentially a mystic. As Tagore writes, 'From the words of the poet men take what meanings please them; yet their last meaning points to thee.' For these religion is essentially a

friendship; and the mystics are wont to think of God in terms of human love. Sometimes indeed their language is misinterpreted.

'I boasted among men that I had known you. They see your pictures in all works of mine. They come and ask me, "Who is he?" I know not how to answer them. I say, "Indeed, I cannot tell." They blame me and they go away in scorn. And you sit there smiling. I put my tales of you into lasting songs. The secret gushes out from my heart. They come and ask me, "Tell me all your meanings.' I know not how to answer them. I say, "Ah, who knows what they mean!" They smile and go away in utter scorn. And you sit there smiling' (pp. 58, 59).

Nor is this wonderful if we consider the forms under which our Bengali mystic figures his companionship with God. He sings of Him as the woman sings of her warrior lover.

'I thought I should ask of thee-but I dared not-the rose wreath thou hadst on thy neck. Thus I waited for the morning, when thou didst depart, to find a few fragments on the bed. And like a beggar I searched in the dawn only for a stray petal or two. Ah me, what is it I find? What token left of thy love? It is no flower, no spices, no vase of perfumed water. It is thy mighty sword, flashing as a flame, heavy as a bolt of thunder. The young light of morning comes through the window and spreads itself upon thy bed. The morning bird twitters and asks, "Woman, what hast thou got?" No, it is no flower, nor spices, nor vase of perfumed water-it is thy dreadful sword. I sit and muse in wonder, what gift is this of thine. I can find no place where to hide it. I am ashamed to wear it, frail as I am, and it hurts me when I press it to my bosom. Yet shall I bear in my heart this honour of the burden of pain, this gift of thine' (pp. 29, 30).

Another passage with the refrain, 'I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands,' reminds us of another song with its repeated exhortation, 'I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.' That beautiful 'Song of Songs which is Solomon's,' with its wealth of sensuous imagery and the music of its passionate desire, has been called 'the most voluptuous love song ever written'; and men have spoken contemptuously of a

Church which continues to find in it an allegory of the soul's love for Christ. Well, in reading Tagore's songs we are reminded again and again of that debated poem, and we may well revise our judgment if we have been inclined to cast away the allegorical interpretation. The Song of Solomon is an eastern poem; and here we have another eastern poet, ages after, using the same language, which is, indeed, the language of mysticism all the world over when mystic feeling and poetical expression are combined in the same man.

Perhaps there is no other language in which we may speak intimately of God. The creeds of theology leave us cold; it is the swelling music on which they are borne to our ears that uplifts our hearts as we hear them chanted in the Mass. But there is something in this little song of Tagore's that goes straight to the heart and reminds us poignantly of that voice of God which calls us so mysteriously on strangely incongruous occasions.

'The day is no more, the shadow is upon the earth. It is time that I go to the stream to fill my pitcher. The evening air is eager with the sad music of the water. Ah, it calls me out into the dusk. In the lonely lane there is no passer-by, the wind is up, the ripples are rampant in the river. I know not if I shall come back home. I know not whom I shall chance to meet. There at the fording in the little boat the unknown man plays upon his lute' (pp. 43, 44).

Anyone who has ever stood by the Ganges silent, alone, at the time of twilight, knows the unutterable yearning that comes over one, the sense of mystery and sadness that still does not oppress or terrify; perhaps he has even seen an unknown man at the fording and heard the sound of his lute. Men take from the great poem of the world what meanings please them; for the mystic the note of the lute is the eternal lure of God's voice leading us on to ever new adventures in experience without a thought of fear or regret for what we leave behind. There is the same romance in all real religion. That woman of Samaria, who went to fill her pitcher at the well and found a stranger sitting there, must have gone again often on the same duty, but with what eyes awakened to the perpetual wonder of life, and what quickened sense of the possible preciousness of chance

meetings! Ever afterwards she must have looked on common things and happenings with the mind of a mystic. For in those few moments she had looked beyond death; and at such a time, as Tagore too tells us, 'the barrier of the moments breaks, and I see by the light of death thy world with its careless treasures. Rare is its lowliest seat, rare is its meanest of lives.'

In reading the ancient poetry of India, the European is often repelled by the conventional treatment of Nature. He feels that the poet is repeating age-worn similes. But this, the latest of Indian poets, is an observer of Nature; and one knows that he lives much with Nature consciously. The sages of old who lived in the forests lived there for renunciation; it was a severance from men and women that they sought in those solitudes, and no new fetters of association with created things. But Tagore is different.

'Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthern vessel to the brim. . . . No, I will never shut the doors of my senses' (p. 43).

That surely is the modern cry, and more especially the cry of the West. We would eat of the fruit of all the trees of the garden of life. Perhaps one cannot live in the India of to-day beside a community so manifestly interested in all that is present, visible and tangiblehardly, it might appear, interested in anything else— without feeling, for good or evil, the influence of its attitude. Here, perhaps, and through the insistence of our poets upon 'the value and significance of flesh,' the West may claim its own in Tagore. He is at one with the spirit of our generation in his regard for actual existence in time and space, and the beauty of life as we know it in this incarnation. Yet he goes deeper than our modern poets are content to go. Even Wordsworth, with his sense of something deeply interfused,' is vague and wavering in his conviction of the spiritual in nature. In the famous Ode, so wonderful for its poetical charm in spite of its somewhat chaotic philosophy, he leaves his position obscure. He seems to look upon the world almost as the 'vale of woe,' which the more feeble of our hymns pro

claim it to be. The faith of Meredith is of firmer texture. Earth, he knows, is our only visible friend'; yet even for him the blossom of good' shows but in a dream. Tagore knows that the world is lovely; like Linnæus, he would, we are sure, go down on his knees at the first sight of furze in bloom on an English heath. But he has no false views about this loveliness. Not his to lament the passing of the flowers, or to find a figure in the sadness of autumn for man's perpetual shadow of mortality. He is a true mystic; he knows!

'I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light, and thus am I blessed-let this be my parting word. In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless. My whole body and my limbs have thrilled with his touch who is beyond touch; and if the end comes here, let it come-let this be my parting word' (p. 56).

Not his to speak of trailing clouds of glory,' or the passing of splendour from the earth as we grow to all our strength of manhood.

'When in the morning I looked upon the light, I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries when from the right breast the mother takes it away, in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation' (p. 55).

Browning and Meredith would have rejoiced to read that, for it carries their own thoughts to yet further heights. One finds, indeed, in Tagore much to remind one, with a difference, of our later English poets. What lover of poetry does not remember Coventry Patmore's poem of 'The Toys'? Here is the same inference from the human to the divine, used, one must think, to better purpose even.

When I bring to you coloured toys, my child, I understand why there is such a play of colours on clouds, on water, and why flowers are painted in tints-when I give coloured toys to you, my child.