Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/130

 schools and of the literary habit,—there is some grace too in the Bengali tongue which makes of it a rare instrument, alike free from the academic airs of Sanskrit and from the mixed idiom of the base dialects.

So far as an ignorant Western reader can learn, Rabindranath Tagore has been able in his poems and other writings to preserve with uncommon felicity and naturalness of effect the balance between the Sanskrit and the Bengali idioms. He has the instinctive sense which warns him off the schoolman's word and the intimidating note of pedantry, and in the Bengali tongue has been, we are told, carried to its most forcible and melodious pitch. It has the quality begotten of the inherent music of a tongue, which we find in the best of our Elizabethans, who wrote with a true regard for the spoken word and its clear enunciation, using all those associations of word behind word, and thought within thought, to which Coleridge alludes in a famous passage of the.