Aru, the elder daughter, born in 1854,
was eighteen months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, who was
born in Calcutta on March 4, 1856. With the exception of one year's
visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls was spent in Calcutta, at
their father's garden-house. In a poem now printed for the first time,
Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the circling
wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves of the
lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches of the central
casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to a
European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this
wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindoo, full of the typical
qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present volume shows us for
the first time, preserving to the last her appreciation of the poetic
side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had
been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith.
Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and legends of their
people, stories which it was the last labor of her life to weave into
English verse; but it would seem that the marvellous faculties of Toru's
mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father decided
to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French.
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