Page:Personality (Lectures delivered in America).djvu/40

26 I salute the Life that is revealed and that is hidden;

I salute the Life in suspense, standing still like a mountain,

And the Life of the surging sea of fire;

The Life that is tender like a lotus, and hard like a thunderbolt.

I salute the Life which is of the mind, with its one side in the dark and the other in the light.

I salute the Life in the house and the Life abroad in the unknown,

The Life full of joy and the Life weary with its pains,

The Life eternally moving, rocking the world into stillness,

The Life deep and silent, breaking out into roaring waves.

This idea of life is not a mere logical deduction; it is as real to the poetess as the air to the bird who feels it at every beat of its wings. Woman has realized the mystery of life in her child more intimately than man has done. This woman's nature in the poet has felt the deep stir of life in all the world. She has known it to be infinite,—not through any reasoning process, but through the illumination of her feeling. Therefore the same idea, which is a mere abstraction to one whose sense of the reality is limited, becomes luminously real to another whose sensibility has a wider range. We have often heard the Indian mind described by Western critics as metaphysical, because it is ready to soar in the infinite. But it has to be noted that the infinite is not a mere matter of philosophical