ments on Victor Hugo. His name is among the great ones of the earth. With Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Goethe, and Schiller, his place has been long prepared in the Valhalla of the poets."
Her poetic imagination led her to place Victor Hugo above Lamartine, although she was quite ready to acknowledge the moral superiority of the latter.
"In fancy, in imagination, in brilliancy, in grandeur, in style, in all that makes a poet, he must yield to Victor Hugo: in purity he yields to none. His mind is essentially religious. He never forgot what he learned at his mother's knee."
Toru Dutt's first collection of poems was prefaced by a dedicatory poem to her mother, translated from Xavier Labenski. A copy of the first edition of the Sheaf gleaned in French Fields, in the dull orange paper cover, is in the British Museum, and bears on its fly-leaf the following inscription in the authoress's handwriting:—
Au Chevalier de Chaletain, a l'elegant traducfceur de Shakespeare.
Hommage de la traductrice, Toru Dutt. 29 Mars 1876. Calcutta. 12, Manicktollah Street.
Very soon after the publication of her first book Toru Dutt's health began to fail. Her father, whose parental anxiety was quickened by the loss of his two other children, imagined that she had been
