A sudden longing came upon me to go back to the day of that song; to be allowed to make another essay at life, this time not to leave it thus empty and unsatisfied; but with a poet's song on my lips to float about the world on the crest of the rising tide, to sing it to men and subdue their hearts; to see for myself what the world holds and where; to let men know me, to get to know them; to burst forth through the world in life and youth like the eager rushing breezes; and then return home to a fulfilled and fruitful old age to spend it as a poet should. Not a very lofty ideal, is it? To benefit the world would have been much higher, no doubt; but being on the whole what I am, that ambition does not even occur to me. I cannot make up my mind to sacrifice this precious gift of life in a self-wrought famine, and disappoint the world and the hearts of men by fasts and meditations and constant argument. I count it enough to live and die as a man, loving and trusting the world, unable to look on it either as a delusion of the Creator or a snare of the Devil. It is not for me to strive to be wafted away into the airiness of an Angel. SHELIDAH, 2_nd Kartik_ (_October_) 1891. When I come to the country I cease to view man as separate from the rest. As the river runs through many a clime, so does the stream of men babble on, winding through woods and villages and towns. It is not a true contrast that _men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever_. Humanity, with all its confluent streams, big and small, flows on and on, just as does the river, from its source in birth to its sea of death;--two dark mysteries at either end, and between them various play and work and chatter unceasing. Over there the cultivators sing in the fields: here the fishing-boats float by. The day wears on and the heat of the sun increases. Some bathers are still in the river, others are finished and are taking home their filled water-vessels. Thus, past both banks of the river, hundreds of years have hummed their way, while the refrain rises in a mournful chorus: _I go on for ever!_ Amid the noonday silence some youthful cowherd is heard calling at the top of his voice for his companion; some boat splashes its way homewards; the ripples lap against the empty jar which some village woman rests on the water before dipping it; and with these mingle several other less definite sounds,--the twittering of birds, the humming of bees, the plaintive creaking of the house-boat as it gently swings to and fro,--the whole making a tender lullaby, as of a mother trying to quiet a suffering child. "Fret not," she sings, as she soothingly pats its fevered forehead. "Worry not; weep no more. Let be your strugglings and grabbings and fightings; forget a while, sleep a while." SHELIDAH, 3_rd Kartik_ (_October_) 1891.