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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.
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