-grasps warm and thrilling!
What goblets skyward heaved with merry roar!

Unto our Union consecrated be
The first we drain--fill higher yet, and higher!
Bless it, O Muse, in strains of raptured fire!
Bless it! All hail, Lyceum! hail to thee!--
To those who led our youth with care and praises,
Living and dead! the next we grateful fill;
Let each, as to his lips the cup he raises,
The good remember, and forget the ill.

Feast, then, while we are here, while yet we may:
Hour after hour, alas! Time thins our numbers;
One pines afar, one in the coffin slumbers;
Days fly; Fate looks on us; we fade away;
Bending insensibly to earth, and chilling,
We near our starting-place with many a groan....
Whose lot will be in old age to be filling,
On this Lyceum-day, his cup _alone_?

Unhappy friend! Amid a stranger race,
Like guest intrusive, that superfluous lingers,
He'll think of us that day, with quivering fingers
Hiding the tears that wet his wrinkled face....
O, may he then at least, in mournful gladness,
Pass with his cup this day for ever dear,
As even I, in exile and in sadness,
Yet with a fleeting joy, have pass'd it here!

* * * * *

In the following lines, the poet has endeavoured to reproduce the
impressions made upon his mind by the mountain scenery of the Caucasus;
scenery which he had visited with such rapture, and to which his
imagination returned with undiminished delight. It has been our aim to
endeavour, in our translation, to give an echo, however feeble and
imperfect, of the wild and airy freedom of the versification which
distinguishes these spirited stanzas. The picture which they contain,
rough, sketchy, and unfinished, as it may appear, bears every mark of
being a faithful copy from nature--a study taken on the spot; and will
therefore, we trust, be not unacceptable to our readers, as calculated
to give an idea not only of the vigorous and rapid _handling_ of the
poet's pencil, but also of the wild and sublime region--the Switzerland
of Russia--which he has here essayed to portray. Of the two furious and
picturesque torrents which Pushkin has mentioned in this short poem,
Terek is certainly too well known to our geographical readers to need
any description of its course from the snow-covered peak of Darial to
the Caspian; and the bold comparison in the last stanza will doubtless
be found, though perhaps somewhat