Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/140

 CHAPTER X A BOOK OF MEDITATIONS

addresses and lay-sermons that made up the prose-book,, were given in America, and again in England, very much as we now have them in its pages. The English course was delivered at Westminster, in the Caxton Hall, during May and June 1913, and they had a profound effect on their hearers. Rabindranath Tagore has that unexplainable grace as a speaker which holds an audience without effort, and his voice has curiously impressive, penetrative tones in it when he exerts it at moments of eloquence. Something foreign and precise in the turn of an occasional word there may be; and there are certain high vibrant notes which you never hear from an English speaker. But these differences, when for instance he spoke of "Ravana's city where we live in exile," or of Brahma, or when he paraphrased a text of the Upanishads, 116