Little Russia is neither north nor south, but, for reasons which the scientists may explain, displays quite marvellously the elements of both north and south in the two great seasons of the year. The few short summer months are saturated with flaring sunshine, causing the fields fairly to leap toward the farmer, full-handed with harvests. In these halcyon days the people revel in the miraculous transformation of nature, but when winter comes, the land of the Dnieper feels the sweep of icy northern winds quite as bitterly as do the dwellers on the Neva. The population, too, is just as antipodal--in fact, it is really complex. Little Russia was at one time dominated by the Turks, who left many of their oriental traits among the people they had conquered; later, the Ukraine was subdued by Poland, which “transmitted something of its savage luxury to its vassals;” then Tartar hordes constantly swept across its borders and kept alive the joy of savage warfare; finally the Cossack leagues established themselves in the Ukraine and set up a wild chivalry upon whose picturesque exploits the Little Russian has ever since dwelt with prideful interest. Gogol was born with a full measure of the Cossack spirit, descended, as he was, directly from this stock. His native Poltava is the very heart of the Cossack country, and Gogol’s grandfather, who was his first teacher, infused the young spirit with all the imagery and fanciful extravagance of Cossack folk-lore. His mother, too, of whom he speaks most tenderly in his “Confessions of an Author,” poured into his ears the legends of her land. This primal literary equipment was bestowed upon a temperament that never ceased to be mystical, religious, and at the last melancholy--traits that are characteristic of almost every great Russian writer. Gogol was also a humorist, but from the strangest reason, a reason which, unhappily, several other humorists shared with him: he wrote grotesque and laughter-provoking conceits to keep his mind from brooding on dark and depressing visions. Perhaps it may have been bodily weakness--for Gogol was small, weazened, unlovely to look upon, and often ill--or perhaps the result of an intensely religious nature turned in upon itself, but some cause constantly evoked in him the wildest hallucinations. Once while suffering the extremes of chilling penury in St. Petersburg, he contemplated suicide. He saw Death, and thus writes of the vision to his mother: