9. Berlin was the first halting-station of the pilgrims; Böck was lecturing there on Greek literature, Zumpt on Roman antiquities, and Werder was expounding the philosophy of the man who boasted or complained of being understood by only one man, and that one misunderstood him. To these masters in the education of hair-splitting flocked almost all who became celebrated afterwards in Russia's public life, and even the government was sending students to Berlin at public expense. To these masters Turgenef also went, hearing Greek literature and Roman antiquities by day, and committing to memory the elements of Greek and Latin grammar by night. For in the Russian university, where Turgenef had hitherto spent two years, the professors were appointed not because of their knowledge of Latin and Greek, but because of their knowledge of military tactics. 10. When after two years Turgenef returned to his native land, he brought back with him, indeed, a high knowledge of Latin grammar, but a total ignorance of the highest aims of life. He brought back with him a religious scepticism, and a metaphysical pessimism, which colored henceforth his whole life, and therefore his artistic works. For those were the days when men yet believed that the great problems of the soul in its relation to the gods and to men could be solved not so much by living and by doing, as by disputing and by talking; those were the days when the philosopher's stone, turning all things into gold, was sought not in a rule for the conduct of life, such as "Love thy neighbor," or "Do unto others," but rather in the barren, egg-dancing, acrobatically-balanced formula, "What is, is right." Those were the days when Hegel was supreme in philosophy because of his obscurity, as Browning is now supreme in poetry because of his; the shrivelled, evaporated, dead grain of wheat was prized all the more because it had been searched out with painful toil from the heap of chaff. "By their fruits ye shall know them." The fruit of the deep study of Browning is an intimate knowledge of the use of English particles; and the fruit of the devoted study of Hegel was an intimate knowledge of metaphysical verbiage: being, substance, essence, and absolute. But of life-giving nourishment there was none to be had. The barrenness of all this, Turgenef indeed soon did perceive, but when the disenchantment came, his blood was already poisoned; his very being was eaten into by doubt, and almost to the very end of his days Turgenef remained a fatalistic sceptic, a godless pessimist; not till his old age did he espy the promised land. It was only when he witnessed with his own eyes the boundless self-sacrifice of the revolutionists, when the old man was moved by the heroism of the young Sophie Bardine even to the kissing of the very sheet upon which the girl's burning words to her judges were printed,--then, indeed, he regained his faith. He now hoped for his