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, Rabindranath was able to cast his spell over the place, and to make that ungainly interior at Piccadilly Circus, with its strangely mixed audience, English and Indian, into a scene such as one might associate with his own life at Bolpur and the quiet of Shanti Niketan. And what was not least impressive was his recognition that it was for his own people first of all that he made his songs,—represented by the crowd of his disciples who stood there listening to him. They formed indeed an extraordinary line of intent faces—"a hedge of eyes"—and it was well his foreign friends should take part in such a function because there we were able to realise something of what he meant to his Indian followers. He was to them not so much a poet, a creator of delightful and living literary forms which could express their own hopes and aspirations; he was a national leader who had already set up in Bengal an ideal college—"a little Academe"—whose pupils and students were to go forth to help in the task of delivering the soul of a new India. It was so that the disciples of Pragapati might have hung upon his words, as we read in the Upanishads.