In 1878 the young Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was on his first trip as a student from India to England. Though only seventeen, he was fascinated by the combination of charm and productivity he saw in the European countryside. And he feasted on it as he traveled by railroad from Brindisi to Calais. It was, in his words, a case of “perfect union of man and.nature, not only through love but also through active communication.” He was filled with wonder and admiration at the sight of a continent “flowing with richness under the age-long attention of her chivalrous lover, western humanity.” The shaping of the continent by human labor was a “heroic love-adventure of the West, the active wooing of the earth.”