Page:Letters from Abroad.pdf/77

 68

hospitable. However, the time for our departure from this country is drawing near.

We have enagaged our passage in a Dutch steamer which will sail from New York on the nineteenth of March. My days in this country have not given me much pleasure—the simple course would have been for me to go straight back home. But why did I not do so? No fool can say why he has been foolish. I have often dreamed of the time when my wayward youth took me to the loneliness of the sand-banks of the Padma, wandering in the neighbourhood of wild ducks under the gaze of the evening star. Certainly, that was not the life of the sane, but it fitted me like a fool’s cap lined with dreams.

The fool who is content to do nothing whatever is at any rate free from care; but the one who tries in vain to change the face of the world knows no peace. I long to go back to my ducks, and yet I madly whirl round these manufacturing towns, like a breath of the wild south breeze stirring the leaves of the documents of an attorney’s office. Does it not know that these leaves do not shelter the flowers that wait for its whisper of love? Why should I be anything else but a poet? Was I not born a music maker?