Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/230

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ESSAYS ON RUSSIAN NOVELISTS

Resurrection teaches directly what Tolstoi always taught—what he taught less directly, but with even greater art, in Anna Karenina.

In reading this work of his old age, we cannot help thinking of what Carlyle said of the octogenarian Goethe: "See how in that great mind, beaming in mildest mellow splendour, beaming, if also trembling, like a great sun on the verge of the horizon, near now to its long farewell, all these things were illuminated and illustrated."

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