The sacrifice, which is in the heart of creation, is both joy and pain at the same moment. Of this sings a village mystic in Bengal: My eyes drown in the darkness of joy, My heart, like a lotus, closes its petals in the rapture of the dark night. That song speaks of a joy which is deep like the blue sea, endless like the blue sky; which has the magnificence of the night, and in its limitless darkness enfolds the radiant worlds in the awfulness of peace; it is the unfathomed joy in which all sufferings are made one. A poet of mediæval India tells us about his source of inspiration in a poem containing a question and an answer: Where were your songs, my bird, when you spent your nights in the nest? Was not all your pleasure stored therein? What makes you lose your heart to the sky, the sky that is limitless? The bird answers: I had my pleasure while I rested within bounds. When I soared into the limitless, I found my songs! To detach the individual idea from its confinement of everyday facts and to give its soaring wings the freedom of the universal: this is the function of poetry. The ambition of Macbeth, the jealousy of Othello, would be at best sensational in police court proceedings; but in Shakespeare's dramas they are carried among the flaming constellations where creation throbs with Eternal Passion, Eternal Pain. THE RELIGION OF THE FOREST I We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon our attitude of mind towards it—an attitude which is formed by our habit of dealing with it according to the special circumstance of our surroundings and our temperaments. It guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy. And thus, in our realisation of the truth of existence, we put our emphasis either upon the principle of dualism or upon the principle of unity. The Indian sages have held in the Upanishads that the emancipation of our soul lies in its realising the ultimate truth of unity. They said: Ishávásyam idam sarvam yat kinch jagatyám jagat. Yéna tyakténa bhunjithá má graha kasyasvit dhanam. (Know all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through greed of possession.) The meaning of this is, that, when we know the multiplicity of things as the final truth, we try to augment ourselves by the external possession of them; but, when we know the Infinite Soul as the final truth, then through our union with it we realise the joy of our soul. Therefore it has been said of those who have attained their fulfilment,—"sarvam evá vishanti" (they enter into all things). Their perfect relation with this world is the relation of union.