The villages of Bengal. 692 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. Ill. Poetry of rural Bengal. সপ Let us pass from the city to the village. The villages of Bengal, half a century ago, were the abodes of peace, of love and of devotion. The vices of the towns stamped the literature of the courts de- grading it to wicked sensualism ;_ the vain pedantry of scholars introduced into it erudite absurdities of far-fetched imagery ; non-Hindu ideas _ found favour with the citizens, directly under the influence of an alien civilisation. But the quiet Hindu was not in his element in the city. His true home lay in the village; there, under the canopy of
the blue sky, on which the gay seasons of our tropical clime present in succession their ever- shifting array of scenes, the Hindu had found leisure for centuries to ponder over the deeper problems of life ; undisturbed he devoted himself to interpreting the texts of the ¢astras like some Epicurean god sitting over his nectar—careless of
mankind. Political squabbles rent the life of cities ; kings were dethroned, and new flags were unfurled in ancient capitals ; but a change of government did not affect the conditions of life of a Hindu village. Long distance separates these villages of Ben- gal from the seething life of political centres. These homes of the people are counted sacred by reason of the noble rivers on whose banks they stand,—the rushing Ganges, the ever-white Dhale¢- wari, the foaming Padma, the furious Damodara, the great Brahmaputra, the dark-watered Meghna, and manv others that branch themselves into a
