CHAPTER I
THE UNKNOWN POET
The boughs touched his feet with their tribute of leaf and flower and fruit, and looked as if they welcomed a friend. — Chaitanya Charitamrita.
In talking with the Indian poets you will find, said one of our early Orientalists, that they consider poetry a divine art, practised for untold ages in heaven before it was revealed on earth. Here in the west we have been rather forgetting latterly the old inspirational idea of poetry, though it has been developed anew from time to time by writers like Spenser, Coleridge and Shelley; and it is good for us to hear its reminder from a new quarter, and after a fashion that is better than any prose argument—in inspired verse itself. Such reminders, when they come, are apt to fall naturally without any noise or loud creaking of the press; and just so quietly it was that the first signs were heard of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry in our western world.
At an Indian play, given two autumns ago
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