account of the forgotten sin! An impassioned pantheism lends to certain pages a lyric beauty, whose accents recall the tales of the Caucasus. For example, this description of an evening in the spring:
“The calm splendour of the shining crescent; the gleaming fish-pond; the ancient birch-trees, whose long-tressed boughs were on one side silvered by the moonlight, while on the other they covered the path and the bushes with their black shadows; the cry of a quail beyond the pond; the barely perceptible sound of two ancient trees which grazed one another; the humming of the mosquitoes; the fall of an apple on the dry leaves; and the frogs leaping up to the steps of the terrace, their backs gleaming greenish under a ray of moonlight… The moon is mounting; suspended in the limpid sky, she fills all space with her light; the splendour of the moonlit water grows yet more brilliant, the shadows grow blacker, the light more transparent… And to me, an obscure and earthy creature, already soiled with every human passion, but endowed with all the stupendous power of love, it seemed at that moment that all nature, the moon, and I myself were one and the same.”[1]
But the present reality, potent and imperious, spoke more loudly than the dreams of the past. Youth remained unfinished; and Captain Count Tolstoy, behind the plating of his bastion, amid the rumbling of the bombardment, or in the midst of his company, observed the dying and the living,
- ↑ Youth, xxxii.
