as an ideal storehouse from which a Shelley can draw forms more
real than living man, nurslings of immortality, or a Wordsworth reap
harvests of the inward eye. He called his muse the "Muse of Vengeance
and of Grief." He is an uncompromising realist, like Crabbe, and
idealizes nothing in his pictures of the peasant's life. Like Crabbe,
he has a deep note of pathos, and a keen but not so minute an eye for
landscape.

On the other hand, he at times attains to imaginative sublimity in his
descriptions, as, for instance, in his poem called _The Red-nosed
Frost_, where King Frost approaches a peasant widow who is at work in
the winter forest, and freezes her to death. As Daria is gradually
freezing to death, the frost comes to her like a warrior; and his
semblance and attributes are drawn in a series of splendid stanzas. He
sings to her of his riches that no profusion can decrease, and of his
kingdom of silver and diamonds and pearls: then, as she freezes, she
dreams of a hot summer's day, and of the rye harvest and of the
familiar songs--

"Away with the song she is soaring,
She surrenders herself to its stream,
In the world there is no such sweet singing
As that which we hear in a dream."

His longest and most ambitious work was a kind of popular epic, _Who
is Happy in Russia?_ written in short lines which have the popular
ring and accent. Some peasants start on a pilgrimage to find out who
is happy in Russia. They fly on a magic carpet, and interview
representatives of the different classes of society, the pope, the
landowner, the peasant woman, each new interview producing a whole
series of stories, sometimes idyllic and sometimes tragic, and all
showing their genius as intimate pictures of various phases of Russian
life. Here, again, the analogy with Crabbe suggests itself, for
Nekrasov's tales, taking into consideration the difference between the
two countries, have a marked affinity, both in their subject matter,
their variety, their stern realism, their pathos, their bitterness,
and their observation of nature, with Crabbe's stories in verse.

Two of Nekrasov's long poems tell the story in the form of
reminiscence,--and here again the naturalness and appropriateness of
the diction is perfect,--of the Russian women, Princess Volkonsky and
Princess Trubetzkoy, who followed their husbands, condemned to penal
servitude for taking part in the Decembrist rising, to Siberia. Here,
again, Nekrasov s