wing is an
attempt at a translation--

"Through the slush and the ruts of the highway,
By the side of the dam of the stream,
Where the fisherman's nets are drying,
The carriage jogs on, and I dream.

I dream, and I look at the highway,
At the sky that is sullen and grey,
At the lake with its shelving reaches,
And the curling smoke far away.

By the dam, with a cheerless visage
Walks a Jew, who is ragged and sere.
With a thunder of foam and of splashing,
The waters race over the weir.

A boy over there is whistling
On a hemlock flute of his make;
And the wild ducks get up in a panic
And call as they sweep from the lake.

And near the old mill some workmen
Are sitting upon the green ground,
With a wagon of sacks, a cart horse
Plods past with a lazy sound.

It all seems to me so familiar,
Although I have never been here,
The roof of that house out yonder,
And the boy, and the wood, and the weir.

And the voice of the grumbling mill-wheel,
And that rickety barn, I know,
I have been here and seen this already,
And forgotten it all long ago.

The very same horse here was dragging
Those sacks with the very same sound,
And those very same workmen were sitting
By the rickety mill on the ground.

And that Jew, with his beard, walked past me,
And those waters raced through the weir;
Yes, all this has happened already,
But I cannot tell when or where."

The people also produced a poet during this epoch and gave Koltsov a
successor, in the person of NIKITIN; his themes are taken straight
from life, and he became known through his patriotic songs written
during the Crimean War; but he is most successful in his descriptions
of nature, of sunset on the fields, and dawn, and the swallow's nest
in the grumbling mill. Two other poets, whose work became well known
later, but passed absolutely unnoticed in the sixties, were
SLUCHEVSKY, a philosophical poet, whose verse, excellent in
description, suffers from clumsiness in form, and APUKHTIN, whose
collected poems and ballads, although he began to write in 1859, were
not published until 1886. Apukhtin is a Parnassian. The bulk of his
work, though perfect in form, is uninteresting; but he wrote one or
two lyrics which have a place in any Russian Golden Treasury, and his
poems are largely read