and publish these poems for you," said Ashu, and
accordingly that task was entrusted to him. The poem beginning _This
world is sweet_ was the one he considered to be the keynote of the whole
series and so he placed it at the beginning of the volume.

Ashu was very possibly right. When in childhood I was confined to the
house, I offered my heart in my wistful gaze to outside nature in all
its variety through the openings in the parapet of our inner
roof-terrace. In my youth the world of men in the same way exerted a
powerful attraction on me. To that also I was then an outsider and
looked out upon it from the roadside. My mind standing on the brink
called out, as it were, with an eager waving of hands to the ferryman
sailing away across the waves to the other side. For Life longed to
start on life's journey.

It is not true that my peculiarly isolated social condition was the bar
to my plunging into the midst of the world-life. I see no sign that
those of my countrymen who have been all their lives in the thick of
society feel, any more than I did, the touch of its living intimacy. The
life of our country has its high banks, and its flight of steps, and, on
its dark waters falls the cool shade of the ancient trees, while from
within the leafy branches over-head the _koel_ cooes forth its ravishing
old-time song. But for all that it is stagnant water. Where is its
current, where are the waves, when does the high tide rush in from the
sea?

Did I then get from the neighbourhood on the other side of our lane an
echo of the victorious paean with which the river, falling and rising,
wave after wave, cuts its way through walls of stone to the sea? No! My
life in its solitude was simply fretting for want of an invitation to
the place where the festival of world-life was being held.

Man is overcome by a profound depression while nodding through his
voluptuously lazy hours of seclusion, because in this way he is deprived
of full commerce with life. Such is the despondency from which I have
always painfully struggled to get free. My mind refused to respond to
the cheap intoxication of the political movements of those days, devoid,
as they seemed, of all strength of national consciousness, with their
complete ignorance of the country, their supreme indifference to real
service of the motherland. I was tormented by a furious impatience, an
intolerable dissatisfaction with myself and all around me. Much rather,
I said to myself