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88

LETTERS FROM ABROAD

Pearson is busy seeking health and happiness, making himself ready for the time when he will join us in India in the cold season.

S.S RHYNDAM.

The very fact that we have turned our face towards the East fills my heart with joy. For me my East is the poet’s East, not that of a politician or a scholar. It is the East of the magnanimous sky and exuberant sun-light, where once upon a time a boy found himself straying in the dim twilight of child-consciousness peopled with dreams. That child has grown, but never grown out of his childness. I realise it all the more strongly when some problem, political or otherwise, becomes clamorous and insistent, trying to exact its answer from me. I rouse myself up, strain my mind, raise my voice for prophetic utterances and in every way try to be worthy of the occasion, but in my heart of hearts I feel exceedingly small and to my utter dismay discover I am not a leader, not a speaker, not a teacher, and farthest of all away from being a prophet.

The fact becomes fully evident to me, that I had forgotten to grow. It comes of an incorrigible absent-mindedness. My mind has ever wandered away from those things that mature one into wisdom and old age—I have neglected my lessons. And this utter want of training makes me such a wretchedly bad reader of journals dealing