SOURCE: An introduction to The Golden Threshold, by Sarojini Naidu, William Heinemann, 1905, pp. 9-23.

In the following introduction of Naidu's The Golden Threshold, Symons expresses his strong admiration of Naidu's poetry and relates the friendship he developed with her through letters.

It is at my persuasion that these poems are now published. The earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter made me very proud and very sad," she wrote. "Is it possible that I have written verses that are "filled with beauty,' and is it possible that you really...