In this country, it is true, we have visions and vistas of distant hills and great brooding waters, of starlit nights and magical twilights; in this country, it is also true that we hear the echoes of magic horns, the footfall of the fairies, the tinkling hammers of the sedulous Kobolds, and the champing and the neighing of the steeds of Chivalry. But there is nothing wildly fantastic, nor portentously exuberant, nor gorgeously dazzling; nothing tempestuous, unbridled, or extreme. When the Germans have wished to express such things, they have done so in their music; they certainly have not done so in their poetry. What they have done in their poetry, and what they have done better than any one else, is to express in the simplest of all words the simplest of all thoughts and feelings. They have spoken of first love, of spring and the flowers, the smiles and tears of children, the dreams of youth and the musings of old age--with a simplicity, a homeliness no writers of any other country have ever excelled. And when they deal with the supernatural, with ghosts, fairies, legends, deeds of prowess or phantom lovers, there is a quaint homeliness about the recital of such things, as though they were being told by the fireside in a cottage, or being sung on the village green to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy. To many Germans the phantasy of a Shelley or of a Victor Hugo is essentially alien and unpalatable. They feel as though they were listening to men who are talking too loud and too wildly, and they merely wish to get away or to stop their ears. Again, poets like Keats or Gautier often produce on them the impression that they are listening to sensuous and meaningless echoes. Now Russian poetry is a step farther on in this same direction. The reader who enters the kingdom of Russian poetry, after having visited those of France and England, experiences what he feels in entering the German region, but still more so. The region of Russian poetry is still more earthy. Even the mysticism of certain German Romantic writers is alien to it. The German poetic country is quiet and sober, it is true; but in its German forests you hear, as I have said, the noise of those hoofs which are bearing riders to the unknown country. Also you have in German literature, allegory and pantheistic dreams which are foreign to the Russian poetic temperament, and therefore unreflected in Russian poetry.