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'When I sing to make you dance I truly know why there is music in leaves, and why waves send their chorus of voices to the heart of the listening earth—when I sing to make you dance..

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'When I kiss your face to make you smile, my darling, I surely understand what the pleasure is that streams from the sky in morning light, and what delight that is which the summer breeze brings to my body-when I kiss you to make you smile' (pp. 36, 37).

Again, in the following passage, we are reminded of Tennyson and 'The Higher Pantheism'-some may think, not altogether to Tennyson's advantage.

'Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads. Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

'He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

'Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.

'Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow' (pp. 5, 6).

Surely, if it is the mark of a great poet that he should speak with a language all his own, appealing to the men of his own land by the familiarity of the images he uses, and to the men of every land by the indubitable truth and beauty of what he says, it is no crude enthusiasm to call Tagore a great poet. To those whose work lies in the land of which he writes with such authentic beauty of insight, his words almost take on the hues of memory. Upon the bank in the shady lane the yellow leaves flutter and fall.' The rain has held back for days and days, my God, in my arid heart. The horizon is fiercely naked -not the thinnest cover of a soft cloud, not the vaguest hint of a distant cool shower.' The realism of this passage appeals to one who knows the hot season in the plains, as forcibly as its symbolism appeals to the mystic Vol. 219.-No. 436.

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thirsting for the divine. And here again, for those who have witnessed that pathetic festival of little lamps, is the same penetrating combination of the seen and the

unseen.

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'On the slope of the desolate river among tall grasses asked her, "Maiden, where do you go shading your lamp with your mantle? My house is all dark and lonesome-lend me your light!" She raised her dark eyes for a moment and looked at my face through the dusk. "I have come to the river," she said, "to float my lamp on the stream when the daylight wanes in the West." I stood alone among tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp uselessly drifting in the tide' (p. 37).

We remarked at the outset the subtle sense of home which the first sight of Bengal wakens in the traveller. The words of the poet of Bengal touch home, too, to the heart, and we remember that we also have felt even as he has felt. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.' We know the answer to that eternal question, and we recognise its truth. For in the spiritual country there is neither East nor West; the experience of the mystic of Bengal is the experience of every one of us; and from the heart we can all exclaim with him : 'The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life. And to-day, when by chance I light upon them and see thy signature, I find they have lain scattered in the dust, mixed with the memory of joys and sorrows of my trivial days forgotten.

'Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoing from star to star' (p. 22).

S. G. DUNN.

Art. 10.-ALFRED LYALL.

Life of Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall. By Sir H. Mortimer Durand. London and Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1913.

I.

AFTER reading and admiring Sir Mortimer Durand's life of Alfred Lyall, I am tempted to exclaim in the words of Shenstone's exquisite inscription, which has always seemed to me about the best thing that Shenstone ever wrote, 'Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!' He was one of my oldest and best of friends. More than this, although our characters differed widely, and although I should never for a moment think of rating my intellectual attainments on a par with his, at the same time I may say that in the course of a long life I do not think that I have ever been brought in contact with anyone with whom I found myself in more thorough community of opinion and sentiment upon the sundry and manifold questions which excited our common interest. He was a strong Unionist, a strong Free Trader, and a strong anti-suffragist. I am, for good or evil, all these things. He was a sincere Liberal in the non-party sense of that very elastic word. So was I. That is to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals-a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose. In 1866, he wrote to his sister--and I cannot but smile on reading the letter 'I am more and more Radical every year'; and he expressed regret that circumstances did not permit of his setting up as a fierce demagogue' in England. I could have conscientiously written in much the same spirit at the same period, but it has not taken me nearly half a century to discover that two persons more unfitted by nature and temperament to be 'fierce demagogues' than Alfred Lyall and myself were probably never born. In respect to the Indian political questions which were current during his day-such as the controversy between the Lawrentian and Forward' schools of frontier policy, the Curzon-Kitchener episode, and the

adaptation of Western reforms to meet the growing requirements to which education has given birth-his views, although perhaps rather in my opinion unduly pessimistic and desponding, were generally identical with my own.

Albeit he was an earnest reformer, he was a warm advocate of strong and capable government, and, in writing to our common friend, Lord Morley, in 1882, he anathematised what he considered the weakness shown by the Gladstone Government in dealing with disorder in Ireland. Himself not only the kindest, but also the most just and judicially-minded of men, he feared that a maudlin and misplaced sentimentalism would destroy the more virile elements in the national character. 'I should like,' he said, in words which must not, of course, be taken too literally, 'a little more fierceness and honest brutality in the national temperament.' His heart went out, in a manner which is only possible to those who have watched them closely at work, to those Englishmen, whether soldiers or civilians, who, but little known and even at times depreciated by their own countrymen, are carrying the fame, the glory, the justice and humanity of England to the four quarters of the globe.

"The roving Englishman' (he said)' is the salt of English land. . . . Only those who go out of this civilised country, to see the rough work on the frontiers and in the far lands, properly understand what our men are like and can do. . . They cannot manage a steam-engine, but they can drive restive and ill-trained horses over rough roads.'

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He felt and as one who has humbly dabbled in literature at the close of an active political life, I can fully sympathise with him-that 'when one has once taken a hand in the world's affairs, literature is like rowing in a picturesque reach of the Thames after a bout in the open sea.' Yet, in the case of Lyall, literature was not a matter of mere academic interest. His incessant study was history.' He thought, with Lord Acton, that an historical student should be a politician with his face turned backwards.' His mind was eminently objective. He was for ever seeking to know the causes of things; and though far too observant to push to extreme lengths analogies between the past and the present, he neverthe

less sought, notably in the history of Imperial Rome, for any facts or commentaries gleaned from ancient times which might be of service to the modern empire of which he was so justly proud, and in the foundation of which the splendid service of which he was an illustrious member had played so conspicuous a part. I wonder,' he wrote in 1901, how far the Roman Empire profited by high education.'

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Lyall was by nature a poet. Sir Mortimer Durand says, truly enough, that his volume of verses, if not great poetry, as some hold, was yet true poetry.' Poetic expressions, in fact, bubbled up in his mind almost unconsciously in dealing with every incident of his life. Lord Tennyson tells us in his 'Memoir' that one evening, when his father and mother were rowing across the Solent, they saw a heron. His father described this incident in the following language: One dark heron flew over the sea, backed by a daffodil sky.' Similarly, Lyall, writing with the enthusiasm of a young father for his firstborn, said: 'The child has eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, with wondrous depth of intelligent gaze.' But, though a poet, it would be a great error to suppose that Lyall was an idealist, if by that term is meant one who, after a platonic fashion, indulges in ideas which are wholly visionary and unpractical. He had, indeed, ideals. No man of his imagination and mental calibre could be without them. But they were ideals based on a solid foundation of facts. It was here that, in spite of some sympathy based on common literary tastes, he altogether parted company from a brother poet, Mr Wilfrid Blunt, who has invariably left his facts to take care of themselves. Though eminently meditative and reflective, Lyall's mind, his biographer says, 'seemed always hungry for facts.' Though he had an unusual degree of imagination, he never allowed himself to be tempted too far from the region of the known or the knowable.' The reason why he at times appeared to vacillate was that he did not consider he sufficiently understood all the facts to justify his forming an opinion capable of satisfying his somewhat hypercritical judgHe was, in fact, very difficult to convince of the truth of an opinion, not because of his prejudices, for he had none, but by reason of his constitutional scepticism,

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