oxen or piles the _kizyak_ or dung-fuel along the fence
with her hoe, or in holiday attire mingles with other girls at evening,
she is always a subject for the artist's brush. What thoughts occupied
this stately figure, in what way ideas circulated in her kerchiefed
head, we are left to divine. Her conduct is a little enigmatical. Had
she any thought of marrying Olenin, or were her actions dictated by
coquetry accompanied by a spice of mischief? We are inclined to the
latter opinion.

The story of _The Cossacks_ exhibits a close similarity to that of a
recent English (or rather Irish) novel, _The Hon. Miss Ferrard_. Both
books transport a man of culture to the midst of a rude and more or less
primitive people: in each, the hero, smitten with the beauty of a native
girl (and in Olenin's case with the wild freshness of the life), is
seized with a desire to throw off his old life, with its polish, its
intellectual disappointments and its limitations, and become a primitive
man among primitive men. In both, the moral and end are substantially
the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class,
and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings
and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between
the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of
habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies
below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes.
The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric
neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more natural than his
presenting the young Cossack Lukashka with a horse in a fit of generous
enthusiasm, and the latter's astonished and suspicious reception of the
gift. Being utterly unable to divine its motive, he suspects some
lurking design of evil, and regards the generosity as a deceit practised
upon him.

But any comparison with an English book would but faintly illustrate
_The Cossacks_. In the novelty of its scenes and characters, in its
poetic simplicity of form and its unconscious picturesqueness, it is
widely different from anything in our literature. It has a certain
coldness, the coldness of an epic; for passion, though not lacking, is
kept in abeyance in its pages, which are indeed chiefly filled with
pictures, a set of literary _chef d'oeuvres_, drawn with great power
and vividness and full, of color and poetic feeling. That the book