pulous little settlement. I
loved to see them at their work and play and rest, and in their
multifarious goings and comings. To me it was all like a living story.

A faculty of many-sightedness possessed me at this time. Each little
separate picture I ringed round with the light of my imagination and the
joy of my heart; every one of them, moreover, being variously coloured
by a pathos of its own. The pleasure of thus separately marking off each
picture was much the same as that of painting it, both being the outcome
of the desire to see with the mind what the eye sees, and with the eye
what the mind imagines.

Had I been a painter with the brush I would doubtless have tried to keep
a permanent record of the visions and creations of that period when my
mind was so alertly responsive. But that instrument was not available to
me. What I had was only words and rhythms, and even with these I had not
yet learnt to draw firm strokes, and the colours went beyond their
margins. Still, like young folk with their first paint box, I spent the
livelong day painting away with the many coloured fancies of my new-born
youth. If these pictures are now viewed in the light of that
twenty-second year of my life, some features may be discerned even
through their crude drawing and blurred colouring.

I have said that the first book of my literary life came to an end with
the _Morning Songs_. The same subject was then continued under a
different rendering. Many a page at the outset of this Book, I am sure,
is of no value. In the process of making a new beginning much in the way
of superfluous preliminary has to be gone through. Had these been leaves
of trees they would have duly dropped off. Unfortunately, leaves of
books continue to stick fast even when they are no longer wanted. The
feature of these poems was the closeness of attention devoted even to
trifling things. _Pictures and Songs_ seized every opportunity of giving
value to these by colouring them with feelings straight from the heart.

Or, rather, that was not it. When the string of the mind is properly
attuned to the universe then at each point the universal song can awaken
its sympathetic vibrations. It was because of this music roused within
that nothing then felt trivial to the writer. Whatever my eyes fell upon
found a response within me. Like children who can play with sand or
stones or shells or whatever they can get (for the spirit of play is
within them), so also we, w