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The Divine Enchantment (1900), an ambitious work based on Hindu mysticism, described the visions of the Virgin Mother Devanaguy when she consorted with Vishnu to conceive Lord Krishna. "During the term of her gestation Devanaguy was transported by a continual, ecstatic dream. Her spirit, freed from her body, ran through every pulse of passion, felt the dark terrors of the Void, and wantoned in the unwinged blue; thus giving to the unborn child, inherently, that for which the sages vainly sought."
Neihardt's interest in Hindu scriptures had been stimulated by discussions with a sculptor in whose monument shop he worked, and was developed further by his reading of the Upanishads and Max Müller's Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy.
The poem is a respectable first entry in Neihardt's body of work; it develops a cosmology and a creation myth that forecasts many of the poet's later themes. The verse is better than one might expect from a sixteen year old. Only a few copies survived Neihardt's determined destruction of the work he considered outgrown.
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