Page:Letters of a Javanese princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, 1921.djvu/250

LETTERS OF A JAVANESE PRINCESS life? Righteousness was our God. Now we know that God and righteousness are one.

We are reading a beautiful poem; it is in the flower-tongue. There is no word for poetry in our language, so we say flower-tongue—and is it not expressive? All our books are in poetic metre and can be either read or sung. Do you remember the cool, bright tropical evenings, when everything was quiet, and the stillness was only broken by the rustling of the wind through the tops of the cocoa-nut trees? When the fresh evening breeze brought you on its breath the sweet perfume of kemoening, tjempaka, melati. Did a dreamy song never reach you then? the song of a Javanese, who sings to his family and to his neighbours —of love— heroic deeds, and glittering pageantry—of beauty and of wisdom; of mighty men and women, princes and princesses of the long ago. It is that loveliest hour when the Javanese, tired from the hard day's work, seeks rest in song, dreaming all his cares away, wholly lost in the shining far-away past, whither his song leads him. "The Javanese are a people who live in the past," a young friend of ours says rightly. "They are lost in the blissful dreams of their eternal sleep." That is true, but we are alive, we must live; and life always goes forward.

Our friend says, too: "Your people must be awakened to a practical realization of the outside world." Many things that are dear to us will then be driven into the background, but should we for that reason, delay the awakening?

Dreams are splendid, but what would become of us if we dreamed for ever? We must make ourselves nobler, by trying to make our dreams real. —228—