Particularly in the cycle _Songs of the Maidens_ in the book _Celebration_, the atmosphere is condensed and becomes the psychic background of the landscape against which the gesture of longing or expectation is seen and felt. It is the impatience to burst into blossoming, the longing for love which pulsates in these _Songs of the Maidens_ with the tenseness of suspense. _The Prayers of the Maidens to Mary_ have not the mild melody of maidenly prayer; they vibrate with the ecstasy of expectant life, and the Madonna is more than the Heavenly Virgin, their longing transforms her into the symbol of earthly love and motherhood. This expectation, in spite of its intensity, is subdued and is only heard like the cadence of a far off dream: "How shall I go on tiptoe From childhood to Annunciation Through the dim twilight Into Thy Garden?" Mention should be made of some prose writings which Rilke published in the year 1898 and shortly afterward. They are _Two Stories of Prague_, _The Touch of Life_ and _The Last_; three volumes of short stories; a two-act drama, _The Daily Life_, points to a strong Maeterlinck influence, and finally _Stories of God_. With both beauty of detail and problematic interest, the short stories show an incoherence of treatment and a lack of dramatic co-ordination easily conceivable in a poet who is essentially lyrical and who at that time had not mastered the means of technique to give to his characters the clear chiselling of the epic form. * * * * * A sojourn in Russia and especially the acquaintance with the novels of Dostoievsky became potent factors in Rilke's development and served to deepen creations which without this influence might have terminated in a grandiose æsthesia. Broadly speaking, Russian art and literature may be described as springing from an ethical impulse and as having for their motive power and _raison d'être_ the tendency toward socio-political reform, in contradistinction to the art and literature of Western culture, whose motives and aims are primarily of an æsthetic nature and seek in art the reconciliation of the dualism between spirit and matter.