Pagina 7 de 83

I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me

for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of

omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it

lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics-

which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety

of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical

invention-display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all

my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as

much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A

tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has

passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and

unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the

multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble.