"Genius, very likely he has! but as for being natural. . . . That's just his misfortune, that there's nothing natural in him. . . . I want to speak of what is good; of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! . . . He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child. . . . He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use? that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? . . . I drink to the health of Rudin! I drink to the comrade of my best years, I drink to youth, to its hopes, its endeavours, its faith, and its purity, to all that our hearts beat for at twenty; we have known, and shall know, nothing better than that in life. . . . I drink to that golden time,--to the health of Rudin!" It is plain that the speaker is something of a Rudin himself. The next novel, "A House of Gentlefolk,"* is, with the possible exception of "Fathers and Children," Turgenev's masterpiece. I know of no novel which gives a richer return for repeated re-readings. As the title implies, this book deals, not with an exciting narrative, but with a group of characters; who can forget them? Like all of its author's works, it is a love-story; this passion is the mainspring of the chief personages, and their minds and hearts are revealed by its power. It is commonly said that Turgenev lacked passion; one might say with equal truth that Wordsworth lacked love of nature. Many of his novels and tales are tremulous with passion, but they are never noisy with it. Like the true patrician that he was, he studied restraint and reserve. The garden scene between Lisa and Lavretsky is the very ecstasy of passion, although, like the two characters, it is marked by a pure and chaste beauty of word and action, that seems to prove that Love is something divine. Only the truly virtuous really understand passion--just as the sorrows of men are deeper than the sorrows of children, even though the latter be accompanied by more tears. Those who believe that the master passion of love expresses itself by floods of words or by abominable imagery, will understand Turgenev as little as they understand life. In reading the few pages in which the lovers meet by night in the garden, one feels almost like an intruder--as one feels at the scene of reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia. It is the very essence of intimacy--the air is filled with something high and holy. * In the original, "A Nobleman's Nest."