Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/72

52 pious life whose days were passed there in communion with God.

"You must not imagine that I have fully realised my ideal—but the ideal is there working itself out through all the obstacles of the hard prose of modern life. In spiritual matters one should forget that he must teach others or achieve results that can be measured, and in my School here I think it proper to measure our success by the spiritual growth in the teachers. In these things gain to one's personal self is gain to all, like lighting a lamp which is lighting a whole room.

"The first help that our boys get here on this path is from the cultivation of love of Nature and sympathy with all living creatures. Music is of very great assistance to them—songs being not of the ordinary hymn type, dry and didactic, but as full of lyric joy as the author could make them. You can understand how these songs affect the boys when you know that singing them is the best enjoyment they choose for themselves in their leisure time, in the evening when the moon is up, in the rainy days when their classes are closed. Mornings and evenings a period of fifteen minutes is given them to sit in an open space composing their minds for worship.