“The Blind Musician” is a remarkable psychological story--about forty thousand words in length--in which all the sensations of the blind are portrayed with sympathy and intelligence. The author has not attempted to build up a meretricious interest by surrounding his blind characters with the usual accompaniments to be found in fiction--poverty and physical distress. Disallowing all such devices, he wonderfully pictures the life of a child born blind in the home of a wealthy family, his advance to boyhood, his love-life, and finally his manhood’s experiences as a brilliant musician, “who attempts to reproduce the sensations of sight by means of sounds.” The following passage is typical: The boy imaged to himself depth in the form of the soft murmur of the stream as it flowed at the foot of the precipice, or of the frightened splash of pebbles thrown from its top. Distance sounded in his ears like the confused notes of a dying song. At times, in the sultry noonday, when over the whole of nature there reigns a quiet so profound that we can only divine the uninterrupted noiseless course of life, the face of the blind boy would light up with a strange expression. It seemed as if, under the influence of the silence that prevailed around, there rose from the depth of his soul sounds audible only to himself, to which he was listening with rapt attention. It was easy to believe that at such moments a vague but productive train of thought was awakening in his soul, like to the imperfectly caught melody of an unknown song. Two prose poems, of harmonious diction and fine human feeling, I have space only to mention--“Easter Night,” and “The Old Bell-Ringer,” which Korolenko calls “A Spring Idyl.” The latter is reproduced herewith in a new translation for this series, and from it the tone of the former may well be inferred. * * * * * Though not a great novelist--if he can be classed as a novelist at all--Korolenko is the exponent of normality. He is more like Turgenev than is any other living writer, though comparison with the Greatest must not be taken to imply equality. The anarchistic, anti-Christian Artsybashev, whose big-fisted novel, “Sanin,” forms an iconoclastic type of its own, cannot approach Korolenko in lucid attractiveness. Tolstoi, Korolenko followed, but at a distance, for he was of the romantic school and little inclined to Tolstoi’s ultra-idealism, particularly that of the last period. One more refreshing characteristic of our author I venture to name--human sympathy. True, he does not always temper his pity for the “unfortunates” with the sound judgment of the moralist. Whether they suffer deservedly or not, he does not deeply inquire--it is enough for him that they suffer.