As to the merely technical character of these poems, it may be suggested that in spite of much in them that is rough and inchoate, they show that Toru was advancing in her mastery of English verse.  Such a stanza as this, selected out of many no less skilful, could hardly be recognized as the work of one by whom the language was a late acquirement:—­

    “What glorious trees!  The sombre saul,
      On which the eye delights to rest—­
    The betel-nut, a pillar tall,
      With feathery branches for a crest—­
    The light-leaved tamarind spreading wide—­
      The pale faint-scented bitter neem,
    The seemul, gorgeous 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 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 honors 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.

London, 1881.

BALLADS OF HINDOSTAN