Page:Poems, Alexander Pushkin, 1888.djvu/25

Rh are writ not by Friedrich Schiller the poet, the darling of the German land, the inspirer of the youth of all lands, but by Herr von Schiller the professor; by Von Schiller the Kantian metaphysician; by Von Schiller the critic; by another Schiller, in short. Pushkin, however, unlike most of us, was not half a dozen ancestors—God, beast, sage, fool—rolled into one, each for a time claiming him as his own. Pushkin was essentially a unit, one voice; he was a lyre, on which a something, not he—God!—invisibly played.

4. And this he unconsciously to himself expresses in the piece, "My Muse."

Before these lines Byelinsky, the great Russian critic, stands awe-struck. And well he may; for in the Russian such softness, smoothness, simplicity, harmony, and above all sincerity, had not been seen before Pushkin's day. And though in the translation everything except the thought is lost, I too as I now read it over on this blessed Sunday morn (and the bell calling