th
more perfect elegance. The Dutts arrived in Europe at the close of 1869,
and the girls went to school, for the first and last time, at a French
pension. They did not remain there very many months; their father took
them to Italy and England with him, and finally they attended for a
short time, but with great zeal and application, the lectures for women
at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went back to Bengal, and the four
remaining years of Toru's life were spent in the old garden-house at
Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative
production. When we consider what she achieved in these forty-five
months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail and
hectic body succumbed under so excessive a strain.

She brought with her from Europe a store of knowledge that would have
sufficed to make an English or French girl seem learned, but which in
her case was simply miraculous. Immediately on her return she began to
study Sanscrit with the same intense application which she gave to all
her work, and mastering the language with extraordinary swiftness, she
plunged into its mysterious literature. But she was born to write, and
despairing of an audience in her own language, she began to adopt ours
as a medium for her thought. Her first essay, published when she was
eighteen, was a monograph, in the "Bengal Magazine," on Leconte de
Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy which is very easy to
comprehend. The austere poet of "La Mort de Valmiki" was, obviously, a
figure to whom the poet of "Sindhu" must needs be attracted on
approaching European literature. This study, which was illustrated by
translations into English verse, was followed by another on Josephin
Soulary, in whom she saw more than her maturer judgment might have
justified. There is something very interesting and now, alas! still more
pathetic in these sturdy and workmanlike essays in unaided criticism.
Still more solitary her work became, in July, 1874, when her only
sister, Aru, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have been no less
amiable than her sister, and if gifted with less originality and a less
forcible ambition, to have been finely accomplished. Both sisters were
well-trained musicians, with full contralto voices, and Aru had a
faculty for design which promised well. The romance of "Mlle. D'Arvers"
was originally projected for Aru to illustrate, but no page of this book
did Aru ever see.

In 1876, as we