Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/68

 still recall the haunting tunes to which he used occasionally to sing his songs when he was in this country. In listening to them, one was impressed by the evident power of their spell over the singer. They induced the mood, the atmosphere, the rhythmical life, which the song seemed to require.

If then we test these songs of by the tests of the music and the imagination that have gone to their making, we find they maintain that sensation of things realised musically and that emotion tied to congenial rhythms and concrete forms, by which the lyric art is justified. In one night-song the anklets of the maiden who is supposed to be singing "grow loud at every step" as she passes between the silent houses in the street; and she grows ashamed. In the suspense, as she listens for her lover's feet, even the leaves no longer rustle on the tree, and the water grows still in the river, "like the sword on the knees of a sentry fallen asleep." And then when her lover joins her and she trembles and her eyelids droop, the night grows darker, "the wind blows out the lamp, and the clouds draw veils over the stars." Then—last, most effective note in the secret