Excerpt from Life and Letters of Toru Dutt Among the poets whom the gods have loved there are, surely, few more remarkable than Toru Dutt. Writing in a foreign language, seeking her models in a foreign literature, interpreting a foreign religion, she built up in three years an eternity of fame. In an Introductory Memoir prefixed to Toru's Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, Mr. Edmund Gosse wrote in 1881 If Toru Dutt were alive, she would still be younger than any recognized European writer, and yet her fame, which is already considerable, has been entirely posthumous.' The great French critic James Darmesteter says of her: This daughter of Bengal, so admirably and so strangely gifted, Hindu by race and tradition, an Englishwoman by education, a Frenchwoman at heart, poet in English, prose-writer in French who at the age of eighteen made India acquainted with the poets of France in the rhyme of England, who blended in herself three souls and three tradi tions, and died at the age of twenty (sic), in the full bloom of her talent and on the eve of the awakening of her genius, presents in the history of literature a phenomenon without parallel.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.