It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation of past times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad and exuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed days inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out of which there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbo" of Flaubert, for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh and joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of "Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its shouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flashing Slavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh, its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude, chivalric lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlike laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan joy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies and jousts and feasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli and bamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and massive forms, lifted its wassail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of such works, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful warrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed, the reliques, the trappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and gold ornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and the buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chiefly because they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present.