Though Russian society was profoundly moved by Turgenev's picture of serfdom, it was in truth the triumph of the pure artist, of the writer who saw man's fugitive life in relation to the vast, universal drama of nature, that made _A Sportsman's Sketches_ acceptable to all. One may compare the book's atmosphere to some woodland's tender morning air quivering with light, which transmits the ringing voices of men in all their meaning inflections. The voices rise, in joy or strife or passion, then die away in silence, and we hear the gentle stir and murmur of the leaves as the wind passes, while afar swells the roar of the deep forest. Turgenev's spiritual vision resembles this silvery light and air which register equally the most exquisite vibration of human aspiration and the dissonance of men's folly and misery. The sweet and tender depths of the author's spirit served, so to say, as a sensitive mirror which reflected impassively the struggle between the forces of worldly craft and the appeal of all humble, neglected and suffering creatures. "The Tryst" is an example of the artist's exquisite responsiveness both to the fleeting moods of nature and the conflicts of human feeling. Thus the sufferings of the young peasant girl, poor Akoulina, at the hands of her conceited lover, the pampered valet, Viktor, are so blended with the woodland scene and our last view of "the empty cart rattling over the bare hillside, the low sinking sun in the pale clear sky, the gusty wind scudding over the stubble fields, the bright but chill smile of fading nature," that one can scarcely dissociate the girl's distress from the landscape. An illusion! but one that great literature--for example, the _Odyssey_--fosters. When we look over the face of a wide-stretching landscape each tiny hamlet and its dwellers appear to the eye as a little point of human activity, and each environment, again, as the outcome of an endless chain of forces, seen and unseen in nature. Man, earth and heaven--it is the trinity always suggested in the work of the great poets.