d try
and test everything, and no achievement seemed impossible. We wrote, we
sang, we acted, we poured ourselves out on every side. This was how I
stepped into my twentieth year.

Of these forces which so triumphantly raced our lives along, my brother
Jyotirindra was the charioteer. He was absolutely fearless. Once, when I
was a mere lad, and had never ridden a horse before, he made me mount
one and gallop by his side, with no qualms about his unskilled
companion. When at the same age, while we were at Shelidah, (the
head-quarters of our estate,) news was brought of a tiger, he took me
with him on a hunting expedition. I had no gun,--it would have been more
dangerous to me than to the tiger if I had. We left our shoes at the
outskirts of the jungle and crept in with bare feet. At last we
scrambled up into a bamboo thicket, partly stripped of its thorn-like
twigs, where I somehow managed to crouch behind my brother till the deed
was done; with no means of even administering a shoe-beating to the
unmannerly brute had he dared lay his offensive paws on me!

Thus did my brother give me full freedom both internal and external in
the face of all dangers. No usage or custom was a bondage for him, and
so was he able to rid me of my shrinking diffidence.

(30) _Evening Songs_

In the state of being confined within myself, of which I have been
telling, I wrote a number of poems which have been grouped together,
under the title of the _Heart-Wilderness_, in Mohita Babu's edition of
my works. In one of the poems subsequently published in a volume called
_Morning Songs_, the following lines occur:

There is a vast wilderness whose name is _Heart_;
Whose interlacing forest branches dandle and rock darkness
like an infant.
I lost my way in its depths.

from which came the idea of the name for this group of poems.

Much of what I wrote, when thus my life had no commerce with the
outside, when I was engrossed in the contemplation of my own heart, when
my imaginings wandered in many a disguise amidst causeless emotions and
aimless longings, has been left out of that edition; only a few of the
poems originally published in the volume entitled _Evening Songs_
finding a place there, in the _Heart-Wilderness_ group.

My brother Jyotirindra and his wife had left home travelling on a long
journey, and their rooms on the third storey, facing the terraced-roof,
were empty. I took possession of these and the