a rival. Finally, with
delight, she finds what she sought for in her own little two-year-old
daughter. But it was not her religion which supplied the poetess with
this pretty fancy. It arose out of her own motherly instincts, which
amongst Easterns are charmingly dominant.

There are in the Introduction some extracts from Mrs Naidu's letters
which show that if there was anyone who might have been expected to
discover anything beautiful in Hinduism, or suggestive of true
philosophy, or capable of being idealised in any way, she was the
person who would have done so. She says herself: "My ancestors for
thousands of years have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves,
great dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer
himself, a great dreamer.... I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his.... He holds huge courts
every day in his garden, of the learned men of all religions. Rajahs
and beggars and saints, and downright villains all delightfully mixed
up. And then his alchemy!... But this alchemy is only the material
counterpart of a poet's craving for beauty, the eternal beauty....
What in my father is the genius of curiosity, is in me the desire for
beauty."

She is described as being the embodiment of the wisdom of the East,
her intellectual development such as to make her a wise counsellor,
combined with "passionate tranquillity of mind."

Yet with this long ancestry of dreamers, and her own intellectual
capacity, and her poetic craving to find beauty, which even Nature did
not satisfy (because what is Nature without Nature's God?), she
obviously finds Hinduism completely barren of what she was yearning
for, and apparently not having searched for it anywhere else except in
Nature, she never comes at it at all. She appears to have been struck
by something in the faces of the monks that she saw in Italy, and she
"at one moment longs to attain to their peace by renunciation." But as
the secret of their peace was not known to her, it only makes her long
for Nirvana, or final nothingness.

Her portrait at the beginning of the book represents a touching type
of face which one meets with not unfrequently in India. The expression
is dull and lifeless. There is none of the light which shines out of
the face of a Christian Indian. But there is at the same time an
expression of wistful longing for that hidden treasure which Hinduism
could not give her, even when