Page:Letters of a Javanese princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, 1921.djvu/136

 XXI

1st of August, 1901.

E Javanese cannot live without flowers and sweet odours. The native flowers in their splendour awaken in me a world of thought and feeling whenever I breathe in their perfume. Days afterwards it lives in my memory, and I feel the strong Javanese blood coursing through my veins. Oh soul of my people, that used to be too beautiful, that was full of kindness, poetry, gentleness and modesty—what has become of you? What have time and slothfulness not made of you?

It is so often said that we are more European than Javanese in our hearts. Sad thought! We know that we are impregnated with European ideas and feelings—but the blood, the Javanese blood that flows live and warm through our veins, can never die. We feel it in the smell of incense and in the perfume of flowers, in the tones of the gamelan, in the sighing of the wind through the tops of the cocoa-nut trees, the cooing of the turtle doves, the whistling of the fields of ripened rice, in the pounding of the haddi-blokken at the time of the rice harvest.

Not for nothing have we passed our whole lives amid surroundings where everything depends upon form; we have learned the emptiness of those forms, their lack of meaning and of substance; there is much good in the Javanese people. We are so anxious for you to admire our peo-

Rh