Then there is in his work a note of wistful tenderness that steals into the heart and fills it with an incommunicable pleasureable sadness, as do the songs you hear in Russia on dark summer nights in the villages, or, better still, on the broad waters of some huge silent river,--songs aching with an ecstasy of homesickness, songs which are something half-way between the whining sadness of Oriental music and the rippling plaintiveness of Irish and Scotch folk-song; songs that are imperatively melodious, but strange to us in their rhythm, constantly changing yet subordinated to definite law, varying indeed with an invariable law; songs whose notes, without being definitely sharp or flat, seem a little bit higher, or a shade lower than you expect, and in which certain notes come over and over again with an insistent appeal, a heartbreaking iteration, and an almost intolerable pathos; songs which end abruptly and suddenly, so that you feel that they are meant to begin again at once and to go on for ever. This is how Tourgeniev’s poetical quality--as manifested in his _Sportsman’s Sketches_, his _Poems in Prose_, and in many other of his works--strikes me. But I doubt if any one unacquainted with the Russian language would derive such impressions, for it is above all things Tourgeniev’s language--the words he uses and the way in which he uses them--that is magical. Every sentence is a phrase of perfect melody; limpid, simple and sensuous. And all this must necessarily half disappear in a translation, however good. But then Tourgeniev is not only a poet. He is a great novelist and something more than a great novelist. He has recorded for all time the atmosphere of a certain epoch. He has done for Russia what Trollope did for England: he has exactly conveyed the atmosphere and the tone of the fifties. The characters of Trollope and Tourgeniev are excelled by those of other writers--and I do not mean to put Tourgeniev on the level of Trollope, because Tourgeniev is an infinitely greater writer and an artist of an altogether higher order--; but for giving the general picture and atmosphere of England during the fifties, I do not believe any one has excelled Trollope; and for giving the general atmosphere of the fifties in Russia, of a certain class, I do not believe any one--with the possible exception of Aksakov, the Russian Trollope,--has excelled what Tourgeniev did in his best known books, _Fathers and Sons_, _Virgin Soil_, and _A House of Gentlefolk_.