atmosphere of vague beauty over my mind. That one Sanskrit
word, Nibhrita-nikunja-griham, meaning "the lonely forest cottage" was
quite enough for me.

I had to discover for myself the intricate metre of Jayadeva, because
its divisions were lost in the clumsy prose form of the book. And this
discovery gave me very great delight. Of course I did not fully
comprehend Jayadeva's meaning. It would hardly be correct to aver that I
had got it even partly. But the sound of the words and the lilt of the
metre filled my mind with pictures of wonderful beauty, which impelled
me to copy out the whole of the book for my own use.

The same thing happened, when I was a little older, with a verse from
Kalidas's "Birth of the War God." The verse moved me greatly, though the
only words of which I gathered the sense, were "the breeze carrying the
spray-mist of the falling waters of the sacred Mandakini and shaking the
deodar leaves." These left me pining to taste the beauties of the whole.
When, later, a Pandit explained to me that in the next two lines the
breeze went on "splitting the feathers of the peacock plume on the head
of the eager deer-hunter," the thinness of this last conceit
disappointed me. I was much better off when I had relied only upon my
imagination to complete the verse.

Whoever goes back to his early childhood will agree that his greatest
gains were not in proportion to the completeness of his understanding.
Our Kathakas[24] I know this truth well. So their narratives always have
a good proportion of ear-filling Sanskrit words and abstruse remarks not
calculated to be fully understood by their simple hearers, but only to
be suggestive.

The value of such suggestion is by no means to be despised by those who
measure education in terms of material gains and losses. These insist on
trying to sum up the account and find out exactly how much of the lesson
imparted can be rendered up. But children, and those who are not
over-educated, dwell in that primal paradise where men can come to know
without fully comprehending each step. And only when that paradise is
lost comes the evil day when everything needs must be understood. The
road which leads to knowledge, without going through the dreary process
of understanding, that is the royal road. If that be barred, though the
world's marketing may yet go on as usual, the open sea and the mountain
top cease to be possible of access.

So, as I was saying, though at that age