Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/63

 spirit of his youth and the desires and irresistible impulses of youth are merged naturally in the poetry of his mature experience. The copy of his collected poems—a curious, attractive-looking large quarto, bound in plain crimson boards without adornment, printed with the cursive Bengali type in double columns, and published at Calcutta—serves as a very tantalising reminder of the amount of his verse that is still untranslated. It must contain in all about ten times as much matter as we have in the present English books, of which is first in order of time.

The middle pages of contain a cycle of love-songs, twenty or thirty in all, among which are several that answer perfectly, we are told, to the Vaishnava musical type. To know their spell, we should be able to hear them sung to their Indian accompaniment and fully reinforced with the emotional life of the or tunes to which they were set. In some of the old English songs which express a passionate love-motive we find, when we turn to the music, that the words are wedded to a minor strain, in which to our modern ears there is a note of reminiscent melancholy, but