The fifties, the sixties, and the seventies were, all over Europe, the epoch of Parnassian poetry. In England, Tennyson was pouring out his "fervent and faultless melodies," Matthew Arnold was playing his plaintive harp, and the Pre-Raphaelites were weaving their tapestried dreams; in France, Gautier was carving his cameos, Banville's Harlequins and Columbines were dancing on a Watteau-like stage in the silver twilight of Corot, Baudelaire was at work on his sombre bronze, Sully-Prudhomme twanged his ivory lyre, and Leconte de Lisle was issuing his golden coinage. It was, in poetry, the epoch of art for art's sake. Russian poetry did not escape the universal tendency; but in Russia everything was conspiring to put poetry, and especially that kind of poetry, in the shade. In the first place, events of great magnitude were happening--the wide reforms, the emancipation of the serfs, the growth of Nihilism, which was the product of the disillusion at the result of the reforms: in the second place, criticism under the influence of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Dobrolyubov was entirely realistic and positivist, preaching not art for life's sake only, but the absolute futility of poetry; and, in the third place, work of the supremest kind was being done in narrative fiction; in the fourth place, no prophet-poet was forthcoming whose genius was great enough to voice national aspirations. All this tended to put poetry in the shade, especially as such poets as did exist were, with one notable exception, Parnassians, whose talent dwelt aloof from the turbid stream of life, and who sought to express the adventures of their souls, which were emotional and artistic, either in dreamy music or in exquisite shapes and colours. This neglect of verse lasted right up until the end of the seventies. When, however, in the eighties, the wave of political crisis reached its climax and, after the assassination of Alexander II, rolled back into a sea of stagnant reaction, the poets, who had been hitherto neglected, and quietly singing all the while, were discovered once more, and the shares in poetry continued to rise as time went on; thus the poets of the sixties reaped their due meed of appreciation.