Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/127

 a trance, and when he came to himself the tears flowed down his cheeks as he told his friends to leave him.

"I am no longer fit for the world," he said, "I must go to the sacred groves to find out Krishna, my Lord, and the Lord of the Universe."

From this time the name of Krishna becomes the refrain to all his invocations and songs of ecstasy. Sometimes for whole nights together he and his little circle of followers would go on singing while his face shone and his eyes gleamed like two stars.

So great, says Mr. D. C. Sen, was the attraction of the personality of Nimāi that sometimes for a whole night the people sang around him unmindful of the passing of the hours, and when the early dawn came they would look wonderingly at the sun, thinking he had appeared too soon. Once at Gurjari, when ending a discourse to the crowd, he cried aloud: "O God, O my Krishna"—we are told that the place where he stood seemed to turn into heaven. A delicious breeze blew upon the people who had gathered in crowds and a fragrance like the lotus floated from him, while the