Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/141

 only helped to remind us in the Westminster Lectures that here was a speaker who was a new conductor of the old wisdom of the east, and who, by some art of his own, had turned a London hall into a place where the sensation, the hubbub and actuality of the western world were put under a spell.

As for the book, no printed page can quite repeat the things that lend force to sentences made pregnant on the lip. There were allusions, figures, and particular instances in the lectures to be remembered as full of a warm colour which has faded in cold print. The most characteristic passages were those in which the speaker's imagination fused the given theme. Then he was like one drawing on a fund of ideas too fluid to be caught in a net, too subtle to be held except in a parable, or an analogy out of poetry. In fact, the speaker himself was the argument; his homily took fire from his own emotion. Listening to him one realised that he who spoke was one who had been living in the eye of the sun, communing with the air, the stream, the spirit of the forest, and the hearts of men and women. In that regard, we ought to accept as a book of thoughts on life and its realisation: the