Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/35

 all tender and fresh with the new awakened rays of the sun, held out its face to me to greet me beneath the trembling vesture of palm leaves. Nature shut her hands and laughingly asked every day, 'What have I got inside?' and nothing seemed impossible."

As for the school-days that followed, he told us how cruelly one of his masters used to treat him, ordering him to stand for hours unprotected in the heat of the burning sun if his lessons had not been perfectly learned. In this way education was made to seem forbidding instead of agreeable to the boy's natural desire for knowledge. When his father came to understand how much he was made to suffer by the harsh discipline, he was put under the care of private tutors. In other ways the father gave the boy his head, as we might say, to his immense advantage. For, far from being slow or unwilling to learn, here was one eager for learning. Words and ideas, music and old times and, moved him to the heart; and while still a boy he began to write rhymes, songs, stories—anything that could express his joy of life. It is not surprising that most of his early verse was imitative: he began, we are told, with a study and imitation of the old