An influence of this formative age was his nephew--older than he was, Jyotiprokash, who read _Hamlet_ to the lad and urged him to write verses and poetic imaginings. He saw a future for this boy with his fancies and love of Nature. A teacher at the Normal School, also, inspired him to write, asking him to complete lines or stanzas which had been begun by another. Although his father was often separated from the boy, he realized the child’s promise and his sensitive nature; he gave him a vacation trip into the Himalayas, stopping at Bolpur, the Peace Cottage, where his father often retired and where the son was to have his own home later. In his “blue blank-book,” that he carried always with him, were written poems suggested by scenery and incidents of this trip. His father taught him botany and astronomy, as well as English, Sanskrit, and Bengali. Back in Calcutta he “played truant from school,” sometimes, and caused his older sister to write in despair of the fulfillment of their hopes for him; that he would be “the only unsuccessful man in the family.”[96] For a year he went to London to study law but he was homesick and returned to Bengal. In his _Reminiscences_ at fifty, he recalled the years between sixteen and twenty-three as those of unrest and “extreme wildness.” He was the victim of the impulses of strong, young manhood; for a time he was an epicure rather than a mystic. He delighted in silk robes and luscious foods and romances in love. An expression of this time may be found in the poem, “The Gleaming Vision of Youth,” in _The Gardener_. Other reflections are in _Sandhya Sangit_ and _The Songs of Sunrise_, more philosophical. Two poems, “The Eternity of Life” and “The Eternity of Death,” indicate the period of transition from this time to the years of religious meditation. At twenty-three he married happily; at the request of his father, he went to oversee the family estate at Shilaida, on the Ganges. Here, with intervals of travel, he remained for seventeen years, living close to the people and to Nature, and writing some of his tales and poems. One of his most famous love poems, showing mingled sensuous and spiritual strains, is “The Beloved at Noon and in the Morning.”