Page:Poems, Alexander Pushkin, 1888.djvu/60

54 here that Pushkin is again master. It is the essence of poetry, that which makes it not-prose, that it is intense; but intensity to produce its effect must be short-lived. Prolonged, like a stimulant, it ceases to act. Hence, one of the first laws of poetry is that the presentation of its scenes, emotions, episodes, be brief. Against this law the sins in English literature among its masters are innumerable. Take, for instance, the manner in which Pushkin, on the one hand, and English poets, on the other, treat an object which has ever affected men with poetic emotion.

35. Many are the English poets who have tried their voices in singing of birds; Wordsworth's lines to the Skylark, the Green Linnet, the Cuckoo, Shelley's piece "To a Skylark," Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," Bryant's "Lines to a Waterfowl," attest sufficiently the inspiration which tender birdie hath for the soul of man. Now read these in the light of Pushkin's twenty lines called "The Birdlet." Bryant alone, it seems to me, holds his own by the side of Pushkin. Shelley and Keats are lengthy to weariness; and Wordsworth is almost painfully tame. What thoughtlet or emotionlet these are stirred with at the sight of birdie is like a babe in the swaddling-clothes