"Whoever has done or willed too much, let him drink from this deep cup a long draught of life and youth … Everything is narrow in the West—Greece is small and I stifle; Judea is dry and I pant. Let me look a toward lofty Asia, the profound East for a little while. There lies my great poem. [The Ramayana] as vast as the Indian Ocean, blessed, gilded with the sun, the book of divine harmony wherein is no dissonance. A serene peace reigns there, and in the midst of conflict an infinite sweetness, a boundless fraternity, which spreads over all living things, an ocean without bottom or bound, of love, of pity, of clemency."