eous as a bride,
With flowers that have the ruby's gleam.

In other passages, of course, the text reads like a translation from
some stirring ballad, and we feel that it gives but a faint and
discordant echo of the music welling in Toru's brain. For it must
frankly be confessed that in the brief May-day of her existence she had
not time to master our language as Blanco White did, or as Chamisso
mastered German. To the end of her days, fluent and graceful as she was,
she was not entirely conversant with English, especially with the
colloquial turns of modern speech. Often a very fine thought is spoiled
for hypercritical ears by the queer turn of expression which she has
innocently given to it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree
in her miscellaneous poems. Her sonnets, here printed for the first
time, seem to me to be of great beauty, and her longer piece entitled
"Our Casuarina Tree," needs no apology for its rich and mellifluous
numbers.

It is difficult to exaggerate when we try to estimate what we have lost
in the premature death of Toru Dutt. Literature has no honours which
need have been beyond the grasp of a girl who at the age of twenty-one,
and in languages separated from her own by so deep a chasm, had produced
so much of lasting worth. And her courage and fortitude were worthy of
her intelligence. Among "last words" of celebrated people, that which
her father has recorded, "It is only the physical pain that makes me
cry," is not the least remarkable, or the least significant of strong
character. It was to a native of our island, and to one ten years senior
to Toru, to whom it was said, in words more appropriate, surely, to her
than to Oldham,

Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness, and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rime.

That mellow sweetness was all that Toru lacked to perfect her as an
English poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same
be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be
written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile
exotic blossom of song.

EDMUND W. GOSSE.
1881.

ANCIENT BALLADS OF HINDUSTAN.

I.

SAVITRI.

PART I.

Savitri was the only child
Of Madra's wise and mighty king;
Stern warriors, when they saw her, smiled,
As mount