Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/23

Rh Then came to me a vision of the fulness of the inner man which was attained in India in the solemn seclusion of her forests when the rest of the world was hardly awake. The truth became clear to me that India had cut her path and broadened it for ages, the path that leads to a life reaching beyond death, rising high above the idealisation of political selfishness and the insatiable lust for accumulation of materials. The voice came to me in the Vedic tongue from the ashrams, the forest sanctuaries of the past, with the call—“Come to me as the rivers to the sea, as the days and nights to the completion of their annual cycle. Let our taking and imparting truth be full of the radiance of light. Let us never come into conflict with one another. Let our minds speed towards their supreme good.”

My heart responded to that call and I determined to do what I could to bring to the surface, for our daily use and purification, the stream of ideals that originated in the summit of our past, flowing underground in the depth of India’s soil,—the ideals of simplicity of life, clarity of spiritual vision, purity of heart, harmony with the universe, and consciousness of the infinite personality in all creation.

I knew that the lessons of the modern schools