Pagina 10 de 83

The traveller in the read-brown clothes that he wears that dust

may not show upon him, the girl searching in her bed for the

petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the servant or

the bride awaiting the master's home-coming in the empty house,

are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and rivers, the

blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian July, or

the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a man

sitting in a boat upon a river playing lute, like one of those

figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God

Himself. A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably

strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination;

and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because

we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti's

willow wood, or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature,

our voice as in a dream.