Towards democracy

| India, the Wisdom-land 441

Active, using their bodies with perfect command and | power—retaining them to prolonged age, or laying them down '.in death at will.

These men, retiring rapt—also at will—in the vast open | under the sun or stars, Having circled and laid aside desire, having lifted and removed from themselves the clinging veils of thought and oblivion,

‘aml

Pant

Saw, and became what they saw, the imperishable universe.

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Within them, sun and moon and stars, within them past s and future,

Interiors of objects and of thoughts reyealed—one with s-all being—

Life past, death past—the calm and boundless sea

Of deep, of changeless incommunicable Joy.

And now to-day, under the close-fitting layers of caste sand custom, hidden away,

The same seers, the same knowledge. - All these thousands of years the long tradition kept intact,

Handed down, the sacred lore, from one to another, scarefully guarded ,

Beneath the outer conventional shows, beneath all the dbonds of creed and race, gliding like a stream which nothing 3can detain,

Dissolving in its own good time all bonds, all creeds,