to these shores should commune within himself: "I now cross to the
Mainland"; and retracing his steps: "I now return to the fragment rent
by wrack and earthshock from the Mother-country." And this I say not in
the way of paradox, but as the expression of a sober truth. I have in
my mind merely the relative depth and extent--the _non-insularity_, in
fact--of the impressions made by the several nations on the world. But
this island of Europe has herself an island of her own: the name of it,
Russia. She, of all lands, is the _terra incognita_, the unknown land;
till quite lately she was more--she was the undiscovered, the
unsuspected land. She _has_ a literature, you know, and a history, and
a language, and a purpose--but of all this the world has hardly so much
as heard. Indeed, she, and not any Antarctic Sea whatever, is the real
Ultima Thule of modern times, the true Island of Mystery.'

I reproduce these remarks of Zaleski here, not so much on account of
the splendid tribute to my country contained in them, as because it
ever seemed to me--and especially in connection with the incident I am
about to recall--that in this respect at least he was a genuine son of
Russia; if she is the Land, so truly was he the Man, of Mystery. I who
knew him best alone knew that it was impossible to know him. He was a
being little of the present: with one arm he embraced the whole past;
the fingers of the other heaved on the vibrant pulse of the future. He
seemed to me--I say it deliberately and with forethought--to possess
the unparalleled power not merely of disentangling in retrospect, but
of unravelling in prospect, and I have known him to relate _coming_
events with unimaginable minuteness of precision. He was nothing if not
superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very _extravaganza_ of
hyperbole--now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched,
Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of
thought--now laying down law of the Medes for the actual world of
to-day--had oft-times the strange effect of bringing back to my mind
the very singular old-epic epithet, [Greek: aenemoen]--_airy_--as
applied to human thought. The mere grip of his memory was not simply
extraordinary, it had in it a token, a hint, of the strange, the
pythic--nay, the sibylline. And as his reflecting intellect, moreover,
had all the lightness of foot of a chamois kid, unless you could
contrive to follow each dazzlingly swift succes