"My ancestors for thousands of years," I find written in one of
her letters, "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves,
great dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a
dreamer himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been
a magnificent failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his, and I don't think
there are many men more beloved. He has a great white beard and
the profile of Homer, and a laugh that brings the roof down. He
has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help others,
and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of
all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and
saints and downright villains all delightfully mixed up, and all
treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you
know, only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for
Beauty, the eternal Beauty. 'The makers of gold and the makers
of verse,' they are the twin creators that sway the world's
secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of
curiosity--the very essence of all scientific genius--in me is
the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about
Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'?"

It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of
delight" were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To
those who knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure
seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards
beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and
wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.