But I agree with those who, in spite of this fine elegy, do not regret the premature end of the romantic poet. His life, exuberant, brilliant, fecund, passionate, like that of Byron, could have no more appropriate termination than a pistol-shot. He died before the end of romanticism--his tragic history lent him a halo which lifts his figure above the mists of time. I have seen Victor Hugo and our own Zorilla in their old age, and I was not guilty of wishing them anything but long life and prosperity; but, æsthetically speaking, it seemed to me that both of them had lived forty years too long, and that Alfred de Musset, Espronceda, and Byron were well off in their glorious tombs. Puchkine belongs undeniably to the great general currents of European literature; only now and then does he manifest the peculiar genius of his country which was so strongly marked in Gogol. But it would be unjust to consider him a mere imitator of foreign romanticists, and some even claim that he always had one foot upon the soil of classicism, taking the phrase in the Helenic sense, as particularly shown in his "Eugene Oneguine," and that, were he to live again, his talents would undergo a transformation and shine forth in the modern novel and the national theatre. Besides being a lyric poet of first rank, Puchkine must also be considered a superb prose writer, having learned from Voltaire a harmony of arrangement, a discreet selection of details, and a concise, clear, and rapid phrasing. His novel, "The Captain's Daughter," is extremely pretty and interesting, at times amusing, or again very touching, and in my opinion preferable in its simplicity to the interminable narratives of Walter Scott. But Puchkine has one remarkable peculiarity, which is, that while he had a keen sympathy with the popular poetry, and was fully sensible of the revelation of it by Gogol, which he applauded with all his heart, yet the author of "Boris Godonof" was so caught in the meshes of romanticism that he never could employ his faculties in poetry of a national character. Puchkine's works have no ethnical value at all. His melancholy is not the despairing sadness of the Russian, but the romantic _morbidezza_ expressed often in much the same words by Byron, Espronceda, and de Musset. The phenomenon is common, and easily explained. It lies in the fact that romanticism was always and everywhere prejudicial to the manifestation of nationality, and made itself a nation apart, composed of half-a-dozen persons from every European country. Realism, with its principles--whether tacitly or explicitly accepted--of human verities, heredity, atavism, race and place influences, etc., became a necessity in order that writers might follow their natural instincts and speak in their own mother tongue.