We have known you for a long time. We have known you since we Russians came to a communion with Western Europe and began to draw from the great spiritual treasury created by our brethren of Western Europe. From generation to generation we have watched intently the life of England, and have stored away in our minds and our hearts everything brilliant, peculiar, and individual, that has impressed itself upon the English word, the English thought, and the English life. We have always wondered at the breadth and the manifoldness of the English soul, in whose literature one finds, side by side, Milton and Swift, Scott and Shelley, Shakespeare and Byron. We have always been amazed by the incessant and constantly growing power of civic life in England; we have always known that the English people was the first among the peoples of the world to enter upon a struggle for civic rights, and that nowhere does the word _freedom_ ring so proud and so triumphant as it does in England. With wonder and veneration, have we watched the English people, that combines the greatest idealism with the most marvellous creative genius, that constantly transforms words into deeds, aspirations into actions, thoughts and feelings into institutions, go onward, from step to step, reaching out into the heavens, yet never relinquishing the earth, higher and higher along its triumphant road, still onward in its work of creating the life of England. Kingdoms and peoples, cultures and institutions, pass away like dreams. But thoughts and words remain, whether they be of white men, or black, or yellow, whether they be of Jews or of Hellenes, whether they be inscribed on slabs of stone, or on boards of clay, or on strips of papyrus. Words and thoughts live to the present day; they still move us and uplift us, even though we have already forgotten the names of those who spoke them. And we know that only the winged words live on, the words that are intelligible to the whole of mankind, that appeal to the whole of humanity, to the common human mind, the common heart. We know the vast power of the English word. We know what a marvellous contribution the English writers have made to the life not of England alone, but to that of the whole world, the whole humanity. It is with a feeling of long-standing affection and veneration that we turn to the ancient book, called "England," whose pages never grow yellow, whose letters are never effaced, whose thoughts never become dim, whose new chapters bear witness to the fact that the book is still being written, that new pages are still being added, and that these new pages are permeated with that same bright and powerful spirit of humanity that illumines and enlivens the pages of the past.