ong kept
up, which was, however, merely a mass of disconnected thoughts, flashes
of perception, remarks on personal events, and endless reflections on
the unrevealed Alpha and Omega of life--began to be filled with other
matter: chapter after chapter containing nothing but accounts of and
speculations concerning two beings as far apart as the poles of the
earth, and bearing no such similarity: the history and surmised
character of Nathalie's beloved patroness, the Grand-Duchess Catharine,
and those of the child of the wild romance of Alexandrine Nikitenko and
Vittorio Lodi.

As to the mental atmosphere in which Ivan passed these strange days and
nights of his, it was indescribable, but peculiarly powerful. For, just
as there are certain incidents or periods in our lives which, for no
perceptible reason, stand out in our memory with marked vividness, so
these last weeks of Ivan's were so fraught with nervous electricity that
each smallest incident took on the importance of an event. And Ivan,
considering, became gradually convinced that these were the last days of
his life.

Gregoriev was fifty years old; a man ordinarily normal, robust,
unweakened by excesses of any description or by any irregularities of
life. High-strung nervously though he was, there was still no doctor but
would have given him many years yet to live. Nevertheless, his
hallucination of approaching death remained unshaken; and he looked
forward to the end quite calmly, as the sure conclusion of a prescribed
term of study and work: the beginning of a rest of undetermined
duration.

Unnatural as his life had become, the months from May to October were
nevertheless fertile in production. All the works of this time, however,
are so peculiar in style that they remained in manuscript long after his
death, and the general public are still unfamiliar with that which is
probably the greatest, though no doubt the strangest of them all: the
"Pagan Fantasia," after the first reading of which Kashkine and
Balakirev, who were alone together, looked angrily from each other to
the fire, from which nothing but the memory of their friend's dead face
saved that composition which afterwards came to exercise so powerful a
fascination over both of them. At the same time, the spell which those
unparalleled harmonies casts over the auditor is considered so
unhealthy, that this flower of Ivan's madness is not yet in print.
Others of the works of this time, the "Songs of t