g spray and
roar, no beetling precipices which confuse the brain with their stony
immensity, no vistas of vines and ivy and millions of wild roses and
ageless lines of blue hills which look almost unreal against the clear,
silvery background of the sky. In you everything is flat and open; your
towns project like points or signals from smooth levels of plain, and
nothing whatsoever enchants or deludes the eye. Yet what secret, what
invincible force draws me to you? Why does there ceaselessly echo and
re-echo in my ears the sad song which hovers throughout the length and
the breadth of your borders? What is the burden of that song? Why does
it wail and sob and catch at my heart? What say the notes which
thus painfully caress and embrace my soul, and flit, uttering their
lamentations, around me? What is it you seek of me, O Russia? What is
the hidden bond which subsists between us? Why do you regard me as you
do? Why does everything within you turn upon me eyes full of
yearning? Even at this moment, as I stand dumbly, fixedly, perplexedly
contemplating your vastness, a menacing cloud, charged with gathering
rain, seems to overshadow my head. What is it that your boundless
expanses presage? Do they not presage that one day there will arise in
you ideas as boundless as yourself? Do they not presage that one day you
too will know no limits? Do they not presage that one day, when again
you shall have room for their exploits, there will spring to life
the heroes of old? How the power of your immensity enfolds me, and
reverberates through all my being with a wild, strange spell, and
flashes in my eyes with an almost supernatural radiance! Yes, a strange,
brilliant, unearthly vista indeed do you disclose, O Russia, country of
mine!

"Stop, stop, you fool!" shouted Chichikov to Selifan; and even as he
spoke a troika, bound on Government business, came chattering by, and
disappeared in a cloud of dust. To Chichikov's curses at Selifan for not
having drawn out of the way with more alacrity a rural constable with
moustaches of the length of an arshin added his quota.

What a curious and attractive, yet also what an unreal, fascination
the term "highway" connotes! And how interesting for its own sake is
a highway! Should the day be a fine one (though chilly) in mellowing
autumn, press closer your travelling cloak, and draw down your cap over
your ears, and snuggle cosily, comfortably into a corner of the britchka
before a last shive