Page:Poems, Alexander Pushkin, 1888.djvu/56

50 blossom out in full array only in a city like Boston. The reader will please observe that I do not here undertake to judge. Malthusian doctrine, scientific charity, brutality of any kind may be necessary, for aught I know. A great many well-meaning and kind-hearted people have in sober thought decided that it often is necessary. I am only stating what seems to me to be a fact. To me this is a most melancholy fact; to others it may be a joyful fact. But whether joyful or melancholy, this fact explains why so little sentiment is found among the Anglo-Saxon poets even when they feel their passions, and do not, as is usually the case with them, reason about them, or what is worse, compose far-fetched similes about them. Glimpses of sentiment are of course found now and then, but only now and then. It is not often that Wordsworth sings in such pure strains as that of the lines,—

It is not often that Byron strikes a chord as deep as that of the lines "In an Album:"—

It is here, however, that Pushkin is unsurpassed. One must go to Heine, one must go