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 Hindoo
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 vigor 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 March 4, 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 a
European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this
wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindoo, 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been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith.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 labor 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 literature best, she wrote its language wi