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Rh tragedy of his life—the death of his elder brother Nicholas, to whom he was devotedly attached, and who is said to have been the one really intimate friend, except his wife, he ever possessed. Turgenev describes the elder Tolstoi as “a talented talker and story-teller, who always lived by himself either in the country or in quite impossible quarters at Moscow, sharing everything with the poor.” The effect of this bereavement upon Lev was crushing. “Nothing in all my life,” he tells us, “made such an impression upon me. Why worry and suffer any more, I thought to myself, when nought remains of such a one as Nikolai Nikolaevich?” From henceforth the shadow of death falls across his finest pages, and he is possessed by a constantly deepening feeling of the futility of life and the emptiness of the best that it can offer. Even art lost its charm for him. “Art is a lie, and I cannot love a lie however beautiful,” is his summing up of the whole matter. It was in this morbidly gloomy frame of mind that he wrote “Lucerne” and “Albert,” surely the most pessimistic productions of modern fiction.

Tolstoi’s second Continental tour was a voyage of instruction. His alert, receptive, and thorough-going nature laid all branches of foreign learning under contribution. First he visited Berlin to attend the lectures of Droysen and Du Bois Raymond, and study the Prussian penal system, being a frequent visitor at the Moabit Prison, where the solitary confinement system chiefly occupied his attention. He also carefully investigated the various trade unions founded by Schulze-Delitsch, and made the acquaintance of