arkable for coherence and
self-restraint no less than for vigor of treatment. Toru Dutt never
sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the
wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and unreal.

But we believe that the original English poems will be ultimately found
to constitute Toru's chief legacy to posterity. These ballads form the
last and most matured of her writings, and were left so far fragmentary
at her death that the fourth and fifth in her projected series of nine
were not to be discovered in any form among her papers. It is probable
that she had not even commenced them. Her father, therefore, to give a
certain continuity to the series, has filled up these blanks with two
stories from the "Vishnupurana," which originally appeared respectively
in the "Calcutta Review" and in the "Bengal Magazine." These are
interesting, but a little rude in form, and they have not the same
peculiar value as the rhymed octo-syllabic ballads. In these last we see
Toru no longer attempting vainly, though heroically, to compete with
European literature on its own ground, but turning to the legends of her
own race and country for inspiration. No modern Oriental has given us so
strange an insight into the conscience of the Asiatic as is presented in
the story of "Prehiad," or so quaint a piece of religious fancy as the
ballad of "Jogadhya Uma." The poetess seems in these verses to be
chanting to herself those songs of her mother's race to which she always
turned with tears of pleasure. They breathe a Vedic solemnity and
simplicity of temper, and are singularly devoid of that littleness and
frivolity which seem, if we may judge by a slight experience, to be the
bane of modern India.

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 r