Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/167

Rh Shackleton, not even figuratively. It is for those who love and nurse their sorrows. They have not the power nor the wish to move. They are transfixed by mournful ideas, ideas that sing through the air as they come, like arrows, and yet console as with music. As another poet (Brussof) writes:

On a lingering fire you burn and burn away,

O my soul,

On a lingering fire you burn and burn away

With sweet moan.

You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,

Without strength to breathe,

You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows

In shoulder and breast.

Your enemies around you look on with mirth

Bending the bow,

Your enemies around you look on with mirth

Increasing the woe.

So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently

In the eventide,

So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently

For the last time,

which indicates a favourite mood in Russian poetry. Students say such poetry over to one another in their rooms of an evening, teachers in provincial towns say such verses to their women friends, local journalists talk of them, gentle souls of either sex take down the book from the shelf and turn to the familiar page and live with the poet's pain. Such is the melancholy of the cultured, a morbid yet touching melancholy. It is refined. The thoughts are scented, and it is literature and not life which is lending some one expression. But lower down in