On a lingering fire you burn and burn away, O my soul, On a lingering fire you burn and burn away With sweet moan. You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows, Without strength to breathe, You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows In shoulder and breast. Your enemies around you look on with mirth Bending the bow, Your enemies around you look on with mirth Increasing the woe. So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently In the eventide, So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently For the last time, which indicates a favourite mood in Russian poetry. Students say such poetry over to one another in their rooms of an evening, teachers in provincial towns say such verses to their women friends, local journalists talk of them, gentle souls of either sex take down the book from the shelf and turn to the familiar page and live with the poet’s pain. Such is the melancholy of the cultured, a morbid yet touching melancholy. It is refined. The thoughts are scented, and it is literature and not life which is lending some one expression. But lower down in society, where there is less reading, life itself gives the terms of this outlook. So the coffin-maker in Tchekhof’s story—“Rothschild’s Fiddle”—has a ledger in which he notes down at the end of each day the _losses_ of the day. All life expresses itself to him in losses, terrible, terrible losses. Smerdyakof, Dostoieffsky’s most morbid conception, catches cats and hangs them at midnight with a ceremony and ritual of his own invention. The old beggar pilgrim sings with cracked voice as he trudges through wind and rain: I will go up on the hi-igh mounta-ain And look into the mi-ighty de-ep, A-and see about me a-all the earth Where I fre-et and ve-ex my soul. Ah, Eternity, it is but The-e I se-ek, Little gra-ave, my little gra-a-a-a-ve, You are my e-everla-asting ho-ome. Yellow sand my be-ed, Stones my ne-eigh-bours, Wo-orms my fri-ends, The da-amp earth my mo-other, Mo-other, my mo-other. Take me to e-e-ternal re-est. O Lord have me-e-e-e-ercy![8] Indeed, many such examples might be adduced to show the pre-occupation of the Russian with the idea of death. The funeral service music is favourite popular music. In the procession of moods in the soul of the young man he comes comparatively rapidly to “worms my neighbours.” The excessive number of suicides in Russia may be explained by the extraordinary liability of the Russian soul to falling into a morbid state.