Russian novels, to judge from the specimens that have been presented to English readers, are prose poems rather than novels in the English sense of the word, dealing more with poetic phases than with those details and events of ordinary life which go to make up English and American novels of the better class. With whatever elaboration of plot or the reverse, they are distinctly artistic compositions, in which every part is in unison with a dominant idea, and their effect, not being scattered or diluted, is single and more or less forcible. Their method is the reverse of analytical. Nothing, for example, could be further from the pregnant sentences, the exhaustive analysis, of George Eliot, whose books are freighted with the accumulated and ever-accumulating wisdom of a life, than the poetic suggestiveness of Tourgueneff's creations, in which a wealth of material is sacrificed to artistic perfection, and the highest thought often seems to lie between the lines. George Eliot lays bare the innermost souls of her characters--we enter fully into their lives and thoughts: with Tourgueneff's it is left to a glance of the eye, a few passionate words, to reveal the mind within. In _The Cossacks_ this absence of analysis is still more apparent. It is a picture of a curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. _The Cossacks_ is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in her quiet, regular toil. Whether, clad in a loose skirt of pink cotton, she drives the oxen or piles the _kizyak_ or dung-fuel along the fence with her hoe, or in holiday attire mingles with other girls at evening, she is always a subject for the artist's brush. What thoughts occupied this stately figure, in what way ideas circulated in her kerchiefed head, we are left to divine. Her conduct is a little enigmatical. Had she any thought of marrying Olenin, or were her actions dictated by coquetry accompanied by a spice of mischief? We are inclined to the latter opinion.