Suprabhat: A Review THE paper Suprabhat, a Bengali monthly edited by Kumari Kumudini Mitra, daughter of Sj. Krishna Kumar Mitra, enters this month on its third year. The first issue of the new year is before us. We notice a great advance in the interest and variety of the articles, the calibre of the writers and the quality of the writing. From the literary point of view the chief ornament of the number is the brief poem Duhkhabhisar, by Sj. Rabindranath Tagore. It is one of those poems in which the peculiar inimitable quality of our greatest lyric poet comes out with supreme force, beauty and sweetness. Rabindra Babu has a legion of imitators and many have been very su

Hindu Drama THE vital law governing Hindu poetics is that it does not seek to represent life and character primarily or for their own sake; its aim is fundamentally aesthetic: by the delicate and harmonious rendering to awaken the aesthetic sense of the onlooker and gratify it by moving and subtly observed pictures of human feeling; it did not attempt to seize a man's spirit by the hair and drag it out into a storm of horror and pity and fear and return it to him drenched, beaten and shuddering. To the Hindu it would have seemed a savage and inhuman spirit that could take any aesthetic pleasure in the sufferings of an Oedipus or a Duchess of Malfi or in the tragedy of a Macbet

Lecture in Baroda College* IN ADDRESSING you on an occasion like the present, it is inevitable that the mind should dwell on one feature of this gathering above all others. Held as it is towards the close of the year, I am inevitably reminded that many of its prominent members are with us for the last time in their college life, and I am led to speculate with both hope and anxiety on their future careers, and this not only because several familiar faces are to disappear from us and scatter into different parts of the country and various walks of life, but also because they go out from us as our finished work, and it is by their character and life that our efforts

SKELETON NOTES ON THE KUMARASAMBHAVAM CANTO Five 1. Thus by Pinaka's wielder burning the mind-born before her eyes, baffled of her soul's desire, the Mountain's daughter blamed her own beauty in her heart; for loveliness has then only fruit when it gives happiness in the beloved. तया may go either with दहता or भग्नमनोरथा but it has more point with the latter. समक्षम् : The Avachuri takes singularly जया-विजयाप्रत्यक्षम् i.e., before Jaya and Vijaya, her friends. The point would then be that the humiliation of her beauty was rendered still more poignant

The Greatness of the Individual IN ALL movements, in every great mass of human action it is the Spirit of the Time, that which Europe calls the Zeitgeist and India kāla, who expresses himself. The very names are deeply significant. Kali, the mother of all and destroyer of all, is the śakti that works in secret in the heart of humanity, manifesting herself in the perpetual surge of men, institutions and movements; Mahakala is the Spirit within whose energy goes abroad in her and moulds the progress of the world and the destiny of the nations. His is the impetus which fulfils itself in Time, and once th

The Interpretation of Scripture THE Spirit who lies concealed behind the material world, has given us, through the inspiration of great seers, the Scriptures as helpers and guides to unapparent truth, lamps of great power that send their rays into the darkness of the unknown beyond which He dwells, tamasah parastāt. They are guides to knowledge, brief indications to enlighten us on our path, not substitutes for thought and experience. They are śabdabrahma, the Word, the oral expression of God, not the thing to be known itself nor the knowledge of Him. Śabda has three elements, the word, the meaning and the spirit. The word is a symbol, vāk or nāma; we hav

Rajayoga MAN fulfilling himself in the body is given Hathayoga as his means. When he rises above the body, he abandons Hathayoga as a troublesome and inferior process and rises to the Rajayoga, the discipline peculiar to the aeon in which man now evolves. The first condition of success in Raja- yoga is to rise superior to the dehātma-buddhi, the state of perception in which the body is identified with the Self. A time comes to the Rajayogin, when his body seems not to belong to him or he to have any concern in it. He is not troubled by its troubles or gladdened by its pleasure; it has them itself and very soon, because he does not give his sanction to them, they fall away from it

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE, Volume 3 of the SRI AUROBINDO BIRTH CENTENARY LIBRARY, contains Sri Aurobindo's early prose writings on subjects of cultural import. They cover a period of twenty years, from 1890 to 1910, prior to his withdrawal to Pondicherry. The political writings and speeches of this period, revealing the active part he played in India's struggle for independence, are collected in Volumes 1 and 2, the poetry, plays, translations in their appropriate volumes. Section One: It contains the earliest available prose writings, dated 1890-92, his student days in England. Stray Thoughts in this section are gleaned from scattered notes f

SECTION FIVE KALIDASA ONCE in the long history of poetry the Great Powers who are ever working the finest energies of nature into the warp of our human evolution met together and resolved to unite in creating a poetical intellect and imagination that, endowed with the most noble and various poetical gifts capable in all the great forms used by creative genius, should express once and for all in a supreme manner the whole sensuous plane of life, its heat and light, its vigour and sweetness. And since to all quality there must be a corresponding defect, they not only gifted the genius with rich powers and a remarkable temperament but drew round it the necessary line of limitat

TWO Turiu - Uriu TURIU Goddess Leda who from heaven descendest, how beautiful are thy feet as they gild the morning. The roses of Earth are red, but the touch of vermilion with which thy feet stain the heavens, is redder, — it is the crimson of love, the glory of passion. Goddess Leda, look down upon men with gracious eyes. The clang of war is stilled, silent the hiss of the shafts and the shields clamour no more against each other in the shock of the onset. We have hung up our swords on the walls of our mansions. The young men have returned unhurt, the girls of Asilon cry through the corn sweet and high to the hearts of their lovers. Goddess Leda, lady of la