Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/128

108 his pleasure tries simply to make additions, and we are afraid to stop, because we fear that it must some day come to an end.

But truth is not afraid to be small, to come to an end,—just as a poem, when it is finished, is not really dead. Not because a poem is composed of endless lines. If that were so we should know that the poem was not true. The true poem knows when to come to an end. It has attached itself to some permanent ideal of man, which belongs to all men and is the inner principle of all creation. If a poem has reached this ideal of perfection, then it knows that, by stopping, it does not die, but live.

So the true meeting can afford to stop, because it never comes to an end, but has its continuity in truth. Where we are true, we are immortal. When we are on the side of truth, we are on the side of immortality. But man scatters his life by giving it up for objects which are meaningless in themselves. We make these our ends and then it becomes a life of death.

In our everyday world we meet many men; but they pass like shadows over our life. But where we meet in truth, there all is different. Here, in this corner of the country, we have come together. You long for truth, as I do.