Page:Bengali Religious Lyrics, Śākta.pdf/30

20 nursery babble, and sing themselves into the memory of an illiterate folk by a riot of punning sound and alliteration, a musical toss and play of similar syllables. Rāmprasād took a childlike pleasure in these, and that untrained literary instinct out of which folklore and folksong are born, takes the same pleasure and has heard him with rapture. Much of his imagery is fanciful and conceited, and of anything but universal validity; yet even this has a charm, examined with patience and sympathy. The student of his poetry will be rewarded with a wealth of local thought and custom and of such stories as flower in the undergrowth and by-ways of authorised legend. This local 'habitation' of Rāmprasād's mind is strength as well as sometimes weakness. His range of ideas and illustrations is narrow; but within that range he is a master. If he falls short on occasion, because so much of Tantric teaching is puerile and worthless, he rises greatly again when he touches Earth, that Universal Mother. His illustration is racy, from the soil and of the soil; it comes from the life of an agricultural people. In Bengal, 'every schoolboy' (as a matter of plain, literal fact) knows his sublimely simple reproof to his soul, in a moment's shrinking from death, 'Thou, a snake, fearing frogs.' This wealth of metaphor plucked from a simple life and society will meet the reader on every page. His mind has been a bad farmer; he is treading the Round of Existence like the blindfold ox that serves the oilman, chained to 'the log' of the world; the Six Passions, like crocodiles haunting the bathing ghāt, watch for his soul; or they are robbers, leaping over the mud wall of his courtyard; or they are hired bullies with clubs, like the ruffians kept by Bengali rājās and squires; they are cowardly boatmen, who forsake the soul when the tempest sweeps up life's river. Once upon a time he had house and friends, he earned money and he was popular, but now he is a