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 CHAPTER III SOME INDIAN POETS must get Bengal in a homelier perspective, and call it Gaur as the Hindu does, and garnish it with paddy-fields, and realise the fierceness and lustre of its sun, and the savour of its soil, before we can fill in the background to. There were five Gaurs in India, according to one author; but Bengal alone bears the name to-day, and when we cast up its associations, and listen to the songs made out of affection for it, we begin to understand that there is something special belonging to it, an idiosyncrasy, not easy for a European to fix—as affecting to its own folk as a Tyneside accent to a Northumbrian.

We think of Rabindranath's English versions, his "prose-verse," as so familiar, so obvious in its rhythm, that we hardly care to realise it in the original. He seems in his English to have touched the natural tongue of poetry that brings countries and men together. But talk 19