Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/38

18 was possible and a place where I could feel the throbbing heart of Bengal, the land of poetry and imagination.

Since then I have lived in the ashram, I have got to know the boys and the teachers as my friends for life, I have felt, even when my own spirit has been dull and I have not been able to feel the same inspiration as I hear the boys chanting in the early morning or at sunset, that Shantiniketan is truly an Abode of Peace.

Now that I am away from the ashram for a time my thoughts constantly turn back to it, and I know that under that wide and starry sky, wandering across the open heath which stretches to the horizon on all sides so that one feels as if standing on the roof of the world, there is peace to be found for the restless spirit of man. On nights when the full moon sheds a flood of white peace upon the landscape, one can walk for miles across open country with nothing to obstruct the view except here and there a neat Santal village surrounded by its few cultivated fields, and on the distant line of the horizon a group of tall palm trees standing like the warning forefingers of the guardian spirits of the place, raised against all thoughtless curiosity of outside intrusions. As one lives in this ashram and