Lisa is the greatest of all Turgenev's great heroines. No one can help being better for knowing such a girl. She is not very beautiful, she is not very accomplished, not even very quick-witted; but she has eine schone Seele. There is nothing regal about her; she never tries to queen it in the drawing-room. She is not proud, high-spirited, and haughty; she does not constantly "draw herself up to her full height," a species of gymnastics in great favour with most fiction-heroines. But she draws all men unto herself. She is beloved by the two opposite extremes of manhood--Panshin and Lavretsky. Lacking beauty, wit, and learning, she has an irrepressible and an irresistible virginal charm--the exceedingly rare charm of youth when it seeks not its own. When she appears on the scene, the pages of the book seem illuminated, and her smile is a benediction. She is exactly the kind of woman to be loved by Lavretsky, and to be desired by a rake like Panshin. For a man like Lavretsky will love what is lovely, and a satiated rake will always eagerly long to defile what is beyond his reach. It is contemptuously said by many critics--why is it that so many critics lose sensitiveness to beauty, and are afraid of their own feelings?--it is said that Lisa, like Rudin, is an obsolete type, the type of Russian girl of 1850, and that she is now interesting only as a fashion that has passed away, and because of the enthusiasm she once awakened. We are informed, with a shade of cynicism, that all the Russian girls then tried to look like Lisa, and to imitate her manner. Is her character really out of style and out of date? If this were true, it would be unfortunate; for the kind of girl that Lisa represents will become obsolete only when purity, modesty, and gentleness in women become unattractive. We have not yet progressed quite so far as that. Instead of saying that Lisa is a type of the Russian girl of 1850, I should say that she is a type of the Ewig-weibliche.