eagerness with which the young poet plunged into the glittering
stream of fashionable life, must not be attributed only to the natural
thirst for pleasure in a young man just released from the bonds of a
school life, and to the first vivid sense of liberty excited in the mind
of a youth, who had been passing six years of his life in a spot which,
however beautiful, was still but a beautiful seclusion. We must keep in
mind the different constitution of society in Russia, and particularly
the fact, that the absence (at least for social purposes) of a middle
class in that country, renders the upper ranks the only section of the
social system in which intellectual pleasure can be sought, or
intellectual supremacy appreciated. Pushkin himself always attached no
inconsiderable importance to his success in the _beau monde_; and it is
incontestably to his friction (if we may so style it) with that _beau
monde_ that he owed some of the more attractive, if not the more solid,
qualities of his genius, and much of the refinement and good taste which
distinguish his style. Like all men of the higher order of
intellect--like Scott, like Cervantes, and Michael Angelo--Pushkin was
endowed by nature with a vigorous and mighty organization, bodily as
well as mental: and though he may appear to have been losing much
valuable time in the elegant frivolities of the drawing-room, he was not
less industrious at this period of his career in amassing a store of
observation derived from a practical study of human character, than
successful in filling up--in the short intervals of ball and
festival--the poetical outlines which he had roughly sketched at the
Lyceum. He worked in the morning at his poem, and passed the greater
part of his nights in society; very short intervals of repose sufficing
to repair, in so vigorously constituted a being, the loss of energetic
vitality caused by the quick succession of intense intellectual labour,
and equally intense social enjoyment. It was at this period that the
enchanting creations of Wieland and Ariosto were first presented to his
young and glowing imagination. These poets are emphatically and
essentially the poets of the young: the "_white soul_" of youth, as yet
untinged with the colouring reflected from its own peculiar fantasy, or
the results of reading, mirrors faithfully the fairy splendour of their
magic style, even as the Alpine snow the rosy light of dawn: and
Pushkin, with the natural desire of