ters. One of them nestles
close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby,
unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the
Erl King's daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water
mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of
the Caucasus.

To his two masterpieces, _The Demon_ and _Mtsyri_, he was to add a
third: _The Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprichnik
(bodyguardsman), and the Merchant Kalashnikov_. The Oprichnik insults
the Merchant's wife, and the Merchant challenges him to fight with his
fists, kills him, and is executed for it. This poem is written as a
folk-story, in the style of the _Byliny_, and it in no way resembles a
_pastiche_. It equals, if it does not surpass, Pushkin's _Boris
Godunov_ as a realistic vision of the past; and as an epic tale, for
simplicity, absolute appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to
nature and terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian literature to
compare with it. Besides these larger poems, Lermontov wrote a
quantity of short lyrics, many of which, such as "The Sail," "The
Angel," "The Prayer," every Russian child knows by heart.

When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov's romantic work,
and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the
West--from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda--we find
that in Lermontov's work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled
with his lyrical, imaginative, and descriptive powers, a bed-rock of
matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in
reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the "intense
inane" of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim
twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us
into a different world: for instance, Heine's quite ordinary
adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes
us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.

Nothing could be more splendid than Lermontov's descriptions; but they
are, compared with those of Western poets, concrete, as sharp as views
in a camera obscura. He never ate the roots of "relish sweet, the
honey wild and manna dew" of the "Belle Dame Sans Merci"; he wrote of
places where Kubla Khan might have wandered, of "ancestral voices
prophesying war," but one has only to quote that line to see that
Lermontov's poetic world, compared with Coleridge's, is solid fact
beside intangibl