nurse, Anna
Rodionovna, who also furnished him with the subject of his ballad,
_The Bridegroom_. In Pushkin's note-books there are seven fairy-tales
taken down hurriedly from the words of his nurse; and most likely all
that he wrote dealing with the life of the people came from the same
source. Pushkin called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, and said that
he was indebted to her for counteracting the effects of his first
French education.

In 1833 he finished a poem called _The Brazen Horseman_, the story of
a man who loses his beloved in the great floods in St. Petersburg in
1834, and going mad, imagines that he is pursued by Falconet's
equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains a magnificent
description of St. Petersburg. During the last years of his life, he
was engaged in collecting materials for a history of Peter the Great.
His power of production had never run dry from the moment he left
school, although his actual work was interrupted from time to time by
distractions and the society of his friends.

All the important larger works of Pushkin have now been mentioned; but
during the whole course of his career he was always pouring out a
stream of lyrics and occasional pieces, many of which are among the
most beautiful things he wrote. His variety and the width of his range
are astonishing. Some of them have a grace and perfection such as we
find in the Greek anthology; others--"Recollections," for instance, in
which in the sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass before
him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, which he is powerless with
all the tears in the world to wash out--have the intensity of
Shakespeare's sonnets. This poem, for instance, has the same depth of
feeling as "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry," or "The
expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Or he will write an elegy as
tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture of a sledge in a
snow-storm, and give you the plunge of the bewildered horses, the
whirling demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the quiet spaces of
snow, in intoxicating rhythms which E. A. Poe would have envied; or
again he will write a description of the Caucasus in eleven short
lines, close in expression and vast in suggestion, such as "The
Monastery on Kazbek"; or he will bring before you the smell of the
autumn morning, and the hoofs ringing out on the half-frozen earth; or
he will write a patriotic poem, such as _To the Slanderers of
Ru