now.

In the eighties, a reaction against the anti-poetical tendency set in,
and poets began to spring up like mushrooms. Of these, the most
popular and the most remarkable is NADSON (1862-87); he died when he
was twenty-four, of consumption. Since then his verse has gone through
twenty-one editions, and 110,000 copies have been sold; ten editions
were published in his own lifetime. And there are innumerable musical
settings by various composers to his lyrics. His verse inaugurates a
new epoch in Russian poetry, the distinguishing features of which are
a great attention to form and _technique_, a Parnassian love of colour
and shape, and a deep melancholy.

Nadson sings the melancholy of youth, the dreams and disillusions of
adolescence, and the hopelessness of the stagnant atmosphere of
reaction to which he belonged. This last fact accounted in some
measure for his extraordinary popularity. But it was by no means its
sole cause; his verse is not only exquisite but magically musical, to
an extent which makes the verse of other poets seem a stuff of coarser
clay, and his pictures of nature, of spring, of night, and especially
of night in the Riviera (with a note of passionate home-sickness),
have the aromatic, intoxicating sweetness of syringa. Verse such as
this, sensitive, ultra-delicate, morbid, nervous, and pessimistic, is
bound to have the defects of its qualities, in a marked degree; one is
soon inclined to have enough of its sultry, oppressive atmosphere, its
delicate perfume, its unrelieved gloom and its music, which is nearly
always not only in a minor key but in the same key. Nobody was more
keenly aware of this than Nadson himself, and one of his most
beautiful poems begins thus--

"Dear friend, I know, I know, I only know too well
That my verse is barren of all strength, and pale, and delicate,
And often just because of its debility I suffer
And often weep in secret in the silence of the night."

And in another poem he writes his apology. He has never used verse as
a toy to chase tedium; the blessed gift of the singer has often been
to him an unbearable cross, and he has often vowed to keep silent;
but, if the wind blows, the AEolian harp must needs respond, and
streams of the hills cannot help rushing to the valley if the sun
melts the snow on the mountain tops. This apologia more than all
criticism defines his gift. His temperament is an AEolian harp, which,
whether it will or no, is se