Finally, to the great joy of the Countess, after many plans abandoned before they were fairly commenced, on March 19, 1873, he began to write _Anna Karenin.[5]_ While he worked at it his life I was saddened by domestic sorrow;[6] his wife was ill. "Happiness does not reign in the house,"[7] he writes to Fet in 1876. To some extent the work bears traces of these depressing experiences, and of passions disillusioned.[8] Save in the charming passages dealing with the betrothal of Levine, love is no longer presented with the spirit of youth and poetry which places certain pages of _War and Peace_ on a level with the most beautiful lyric poetry of all times. It has assumed a different character: bitter, sensual, imperious. The fatality which broods over the romance is no longer, as in _War and Peace_, a kind of Krishna, murderous and serene, the Destiny of empires, but the madness of love, "Venus herself." She it is, in the wonderful ball scene, when passion seizes upon Anna and Vronsky unawares, who endows the innocent beauty of Anna, crowned with forget-me-not and clothed in black velvet, with "an almost infernal seductiveness." She it is who, when Vronsky has just declared his love, throws a light upon Anna's face; but a light "not of joy; it was the terrible glare of an incendiary fire upon a gloomy night." She it is who, in the veins of this loyal and reasonable woman, this young, affectionate mother, pours a voluptuous stream as of irresistible ichor, and installs herself in her heart, never to leave it until she has destroyed it. No one can approach Anna without feeling the attraction and the terror of this hidden dæmon. Kitty is the first to discover it, with a shock of bewilderment. A mysterious fear mingles with the delight of Vronsky when he goes to see Anna. Levine, in her presence, loses all his will. Anna herself is perfectly well aware that she is no longer her own mistress. As the story develops the implacable passion consumes, little by little, the whole moral structure of this proud woman. All that is best in her, her sincere, courageous mind, crumbles and falls; she has no longer the strength to sacrifice her worldly vanity; her life has no other object than to please her lover; she refuses, with shame and terror, to bear children; jealousy tortures her; the sensual passion which enslaves her obliges her to lie with her gestures, her voice, her eyes; she falls to the level of those women who no longer seek anything but the power of making every man turn to look after them; she uses morphia to dull her sufferings, until the intolerable torments which consume her overcome her with the bitter sense of her moral downfall, and cast her beneath the wheels of the railway-carriage. "And the little moujik with the untidy beard"--the sinister vision which has haunted her dreams and Vronsky's--"leaned over the track from the platform of the carriage"; and, as the prophetic dream foretold, "he was bent double over a sack, in which