Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/73

 hold of them and poured them into a mould of speech suitable to its own spirit. But still the substance was not quite native to the soul and therefore one feels a certain void in it. The form andexpression have the peculiar grace and the delicate plastic beauty which Bengali poetical expression achieved from its begin-ning, but the thing expressed does not in the end amount to very much. As is in- evitable when one does not think or create freely but is principally assimilating thought and form, it is thin and falls short of the greatness which we would expect from the natural power of the poet. That period is long over, it has lived its time and its work has taken its place in the past of the literature. Two of its creators, one, the sovereign initiator of its prose expression, supreme by com-bination of original mentality with a flaw-less artistic gift, the other born into its last glow of productive brilliance, but out-