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Rh and to realise at leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the colossal monuments which dominate the fiction of the nineteenth century—War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenin (1873-77).

War and Peace is the vastest epic of our times—a modern Iliad. A world of faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills the tempest.

More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and Goethe. Moreover, in the notes, dated 1865,