Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or take a bit of sheer description-- "Pâle comme l'amour, et de pleurs arrosée, La nuit aux pieds d'argent descend dans la rosée." You never find the Russian poet impersonating nature like this, and creating from objects such as the "yellow bees in the ivy bloom" forms more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create a single image such as-- "Elle aurait aimé, si l'orgueil Pareil à la lampe inutile Qu'on allume près d'un cercueil, N'eut veillé sur son coeur stérile." In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; but Byron was far less romantic and far less imaginative than Lermontov, although he invented Byronism, and shattered the crumbling walls of the eighteenth century that surrounded the city of romance, and dallied with romantic themes in his youth. All his best work, the finest passages of _Childe Harold_, and the whole of _Don Juan_, were slices of his own life and observation, _choses vues_; he never created a single character that was not a reflection of himself; and he never entered into the city whose walls he had stormed, and where he had planted his flag. This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his composition,--that constitutes his unique excellence. So far from its being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact, presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis, adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it. A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the "Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last instructions to his friend who is going home on leave-- "I want to be alone with you, A moment quite alone. The minutes left to me are few, They say I'll soon be gone. And you'll be going home on leave, Then say ... but why? I do believe There's not a soul, who'll greatly care To hear about me over there. And yet if some one asks you there, Let us suppose they do-- Tell them a bullet hit me here, The chest,--and it went through. And say I died and for the Tsar, And say what fools the doctors are;-- And that I shook you by the hand, And thought about my native land.