Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/147

 death of the body, which, in the estimate of the, accords very well with that of Jeremy Taylor, who said that of all the evils in this world which are bitterly reproached with their bad character, death is the most innocent of its accusation.

We cannot detach the doctrine of the greater illumination and the philosophy of life on which it rests, expanded in, from Rabindranath's lyrical expression in and. The essence of the lyrical imagination lies in the power to transcend the single delight by conferring it in song upon all creation and every fellow-creature. The unity of emotion that it works toward may seem in the first impulse to be alike selfish, self-conscious and intensely self-assertive. In reality, the self-intensity is only due to the confining of a force, an energy in delight, which is ready to break its shell, to seek out its joy-fellows and in the end to forget itself.

By his songs and by his religious ideas alike Rabindranath is a lyric interpreter of natural and supernatural, and of the human nature they condition. His belief in the joy of life, and the realisation in created forms of the eternal happiness, is one that belongs to the doctrine of