ain as
white pimples by the wayside.]

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

These atoms that drop off are snuffed-out souls
Who are enghosted by the caressing snow.

[Pines rise mournfully on each side of the nearing object; ravens
in flocks advance with it overhead, waiting to pick out the eyes
of strays who fall. The snowstorm increases, descending in tufts
which can hardly be shaken off. The sky seems to join itself to
the land. The marching figures drop rapidly, and almost immediately
become white grave-mounds.

Endowed with enlarged powers of audition as of vision, we are struck
by the mournful taciturnity that prevails. Nature is mute. Save
for the incessant flogging of the wind-broken and lacerated horses
there are no sounds.

With growing nearness more is revealed. In the glades of the forest,
parallel to the French columns, columns of Russians are seen to be
moving. And when the French presently reach Krasnoye they are
surrounded by packs of cloaked Cossacks, bearing lances like huge
needles a dozen feet long. The fore-part of the French army gets
through the town; the rear is assaulted by infantry and artillery.]

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

The strange, one-eyed, white-shakoed, scarred old man,
Ruthlessly heading every onset made,
I seem to recognize.

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Kutuzof he:
The ceaselessly-attacked one, Michael Ney;
A pair as stout as thou, Earth, ever hast twinned!
Kutuzof, ten years younger, would extirp
The invaders, and our drama finish here,
With Bonaparte a captive or a corpse.
But he is old; death even has beckoned him;
And thus the so near-seeming happens not.

[NAPOLEON himself can be discerned amid the rest, marching on foot
through the snowflakes, in a fur coat and with a stout staff in his
hand. Further back NEY is visible with the remains of the rear.

There is something behind the regular columns like an articulated
tail, and as they draw on, it shows itself to be a disorderly rabble
of followers of both sexes. So the whole miscellany arrives at the
foreground, where it is checked by a large river across the track.
The soldiers themselves, like the rabble, are in motley raiment,
some wearing rugs for warmth, some quilts and curtains, some even
petticoats and othe