Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/42

 grief to find, as Srimanta did, the lotus-flowers blooming in the sea-waste that had threatened him.

He read the signs anew with the courage of a seaman who is kindred to the wild element, and holds it his friend whatever it brings him—life or death? In another letter of this time he uses a phrase which gains effect from the weight he has lent it—the "making of man." It is so that Celtic folk will sometimes speak of "making the soul." But now it was the soul of the world that was to be made; and to bring about such a renaissance, there was needed, in his conception, a more humane order, a finer science of life, and a spiritual republic behind our world-politics. We may venture to enlarge his hope as we think it over, and to connect it with that other—the binding in one commonwealth of the United States of the World. The union of nations, the destroying of caste, religious pride, race-hatred, and race-prejudice—in a word, the "Making of Man"; there lies his human aim. "It is," he says, "the one problem of the present age, and we must be prepared to go through the martyrdom of sufferings and humiliations till the victory of God in man is achieved."