t opera "Iris," for which he had written both libretto
and score, and which created a furore on its performance in Petersburg,
the winter after his death.

The months that produced this large amount of work were spent in a depth
of solitude such as only Ivan would have dared to undergo. Nathalie's
letters, which grew more frequent as the days went by, and to which he
faithfully replied; two visits from Kashkine, one from Mily Balakirev,
and half a dozen from Nicholas, who was to be daunted by no amount of
taciturnity, were the only incidents of the period. Balakirev, indeed,
had brought with him a young protege, one Rimsky-Korsakow, (since heard
from,) to worship at the shrine of Russia's Gregoriev; whereupon that
hero, highly disgusted, behaved so boorishly that the chagrined
Balakirev refused Nicholas' next plea, and would not go again. Ivan's
one, regular recreation were his long, solitary walks through the
country-side, disturbed only by the clamorings of children, whom he had
spoiled with kopecks, and whose chatterings interrupted his thoughts no
more than did the voices of squirrels and birds--from which latter,
indeed, he got many an idea.

These five-mile walks, with four hours in the morning and two in the
evening at the piano, an hour or so spent in skimming over some of the
scores in his vast musical library, considerable reading, especially at
meal-times, of Russian, French and English novelists and the German
philosophers, whom he approached worshipfully, formed the occupations of
his quiet life during many years. And, as the first months passed, he
began to realize that his painfully acquired philosophy of living was
demonstrating its practicability in the many volumes of his daily
journal.

No artist, nor, indeed, any scholar or original thinker of temperament,
can progress far in his chosen work without acquiring a certain
philosophic attitude of his own that makes for religion; though it be no
more than the result of orderly habits of thought: its premise gleaned
merely from a continual subconscious synthesis of the sum of personal
existence. The type of the synthesis matters no more than the form of
its result: mockery and atheism of Schopenhauer or von Hartmann; poetic
illogicalities of Hegel; dizzy flights of Schelling; materialism of
Locke; idealism of Berkeley; magnificent transcendentalism of the
imperial Kant;--they become one at last. Truth is one and indivisible;
therefore it is the sincerit