Each religion is happily touched with a delicate hand. To get a suitable idea concerning each into a couple of lines of real poetry shows a gifted mind, and the two last lines are specially happy. (The capital letter in the pronoun is so printed in the book.) Her mind coming thus into brief contact with higher and truer things, she rises in the concluding verse to a kind of benediction on this beneficent Mohammedan ruler, which almost approaches the nature of a prayer:-- "God give you joy, God give you grace, To shield the truth and smite the wrong, To honour Virtue, Valour, Worth, To cherish faith and foster song. Your name within a nation's prayer, Your music on a nation's tongue." The only other poem which rises above the mere commonplace is that in which Queen Gulnaar expresses the unsatisfied condition of her heart because she has no rival to her beauty, and with none to envy, life has no savour. Although seven beautiful brides are sent for and brought before her, she remains without 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."