They
are always busy erecting walls and rules round themselves, and how careful
they are with their curtains lest they should see! It is a wonder to me
they have not made drab covers for flowering plants and put up a canopy to
ward off the moon. If the next life is determined by the desires of this,
then I should be reborn from our enshrouded planet into some free and open
realm of joy.
Only those who cannot steep themselves in beauty to the full, despise it
as an object of the senses. But those who have tasted of its
inexpressibility know how far it is beyond the highest powers of mere eye
or ear--nay, even the heart is powerless to attain the end of its
yearning.
_P.S._--I have left out the very thing I started to tell of. Don't be
afraid, it won't take four more sheets. It is this, that on the evening of
the first day of _Asarh_ it came on to rain very heavily, in great
lance-like showers. That is all.
ON THE WAY TO GOALUNDA,
_21st June 1892._
Pictures in an endless variety, of sand-banks, fields and their crops, and
villages, glide into view on either hand--of clouds floating in the sky,
of colours blossoming when day meets night. Boats steal by, fishermen
catch fish; the waters make liquid, caressing sounds throughout the
livelong day; their broad expanse calms down in the evening stillness,
like a child lulled to sleep, over whom all the stars in the boundless sky
keep watch--then, as I sit up on wakeful nights, with sleeping banks on
either side, the silence is broken only by an occasional cry of a jackal
in the woods near some village, or by fragments undermined by the keen
current of the Padma, that tumble from the high cliff-like bank into the
water.
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