History of Bengali Language and Literature c11.6

c11.6

I have said more than once in the foregoing chapters that the heart of Bengal lay in her villages,—contented as these were with their never-ceasing fountain of domestic and spiritual happiness. Our people did not hitherto care for the world outside the pale of their homes. They worked and sang, prayed, fasted and had visions of God. They heard the bird Kokil coo from the mango boughs in spring, and saw their favourite flower, the lotus, bloom in their tanks in autumn; and blithely did they sing about all these, and about the sweets of home life. They were content with loving their kith and kin, their mothers, wives and children, and thought that God revealed Himself to them in domestic tenderness. They pursued the nicities of Logic or indulged in abstruse metaphysical contemplations, and disciplined their mind that they might take a quiet and ungrudging view of the ills of life and encounter nobly the supreme penalty of nature when in due course it would come upon them.