, Love, Light, and Song,
Light in the sky deep red above,
Song, in the lark of pinions strong,
And in my heart, true Love.

Apart we miss our nature's goal,
Why strive to cheat our destinies?
Was not my love made for thy soul?
Thy beauty for mine eyes?
No longer sleep,
Oh, listen now!
I wait and weep,
But where art thou?

When poetry is as good as this it does not much matter whether Rouveyre
prints it upon Whatman paper, or whether it steals to light in blurred
type from some press in Bhowanipore.

Toru Dutt was the youngest of the three children of a high-caste Hindu
couple in Bengal. Her father, who survives them all, the Baboo Govin
Chunder Dutt, is himself distinguished among his countrymen for the
width of his views and the vigour of his intelligence. His only son,
Abju, died in 1865, at the age of fourteen, and left his two younger
sisters to console their parents. Aru, the elder daughter, born in 1854,
was eighteen months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, who was
born in Calcutta on the 4th of March, 1856. With the exception of one
year's visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls was spent in
Calcutta, at their father's garden-house. In a poem now printed for the
first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the
circling wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves
of the lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches of the central
casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to an
European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this
wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindu, full of the typical
qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present volume shows us for
the first time, preserving to the last her appreciation of the poetic
side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had
been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer
faith. Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and legends of
their people, stories which it was the last labour of her life to weave
into English verse; but it would seem that the marvellous faculties of
Toru's mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father
decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French. To
the end of her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She
loved France best, she knew its