ssia_, fraught with patriotic indignation without being offensive;
in this poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of Russia: "Will not,"
he says, "from Perm to the Caucasus, from Finland's chill rocks to the
flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to the unshaken walls of
China, glistening with its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise?"
Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance and as humble in
spirit as one of the old Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as
Musset and as playful as Heine: he will translate you the spirit of
Horace and the spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure the
restraint of Andre Chenier, and the impetuous gallop of Byron.

Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin's poems is the poem which
expresses his view of life in the elegy--

"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine
Is the remembrance of delirious days;
But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs
The past more sorely, as my days decline.
My path is dark. The future lies in wait,
A gathering ocean of anxiety,
But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create,
That is my prayer; to live and not to die!
I know that ecstasy shall still lie there
In sorrow and adversity and care.
Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine,
Be moved to tears by musings that are mine;
And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh
Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."

But the greatest of his short poems is probably "The Prophet." This is
a tremendous poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin only attained
once. It is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression; the
syllables ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a silver clarion.
It is, as it were, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.
Nothing finer as sound could ever be compounded with Russian vowels
and consonants; nothing could be more perfectly planned, or present,
in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the imagination. Even a
rough prose translation will give some idea of the imaginative
splendour of the poem--

"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark
wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the
crossing of the ways: And he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were
as soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my
prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them
with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heav