o
foreign models. It is true that, as a school-boy, he wrote verses full
of Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these were merely echoes of
his reading. The gloom of spirit which he expressed later on was a
permanent and innate feature of his own temperament. Later, the
reading of Shelley spurred on his imagination to emulation, but not to
imitation. He sought his own path from the beginning, and he remained
in it with obdurate persistence. He remained obstinately himself,
indifferent as a rule to outside events, currents of thought and
feeling. And he clung to the themes which he chose in his youth. His
mind to him a kingdom was, and he peopled it with images and fancies
of his own devising. The path which he chose was a narrow one. It was
a romantic path. He chose for the subject of the poem by which he is
perhaps most widely known, _The Demon_, the love of a demon for a
woman. The subject is as romantic as any chosen by Thomas Moore; but
there is nothing now that appears rococo in Lermontov's work. The
colours are as fresh to-day as when they were first laid on. The
heroine is a Circassian woman, and the action of the poem is in the
Caucasus.

The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that denies of Goethe, nor
Byron's Lucifer, looking the Almighty in His face and telling him that
His evil is not good; nor does he cherish--

"the study of revenge, immortal hate,"

of Milton's Satan; but he is the lost angel of a ruined paradise, who
is too proud to accept oblivion even were it offered to him. He dreams
of finding in Tamara the joys of the paradise he has foregone. "I am
he," he says to her, "whom no one loves, whom every human being
curses." He declares that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, that he
desires to be reconciled with Heaven, to love, to pray, to believe in
good. And he pours out to her one of the most passionate love
declarations ever written, in couplet after couplet of words that glow
like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp, Tamara yields to
him, and forfeits her life; but her soul is borne to Heaven by the
Angel of Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, and the Demon is
left as before alone in a loveless, lampless universe. The poem is
interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, which are as glowing
and splendid as the impassioned utterance of the Demon. They put
Pushkin's descriptions in the shade. Lermontov's landscape-painting
compared with Pushkin's is like a picture of Tu