berator,"
narrates how "a dreadful cloud of black, bloodthirsty ravens assembled,
and invited to them the underground, subterranean rats, not to a
feast-ball, not to a christening, but to undermine the roots of the
olive-branch." Naturally this style demands that the emperor be
designated as "the bright falcon, light winged, swift eyed." It
describes the plot, and how the bombs were to be wrapped up in white
cloths, and the conspirators were "to go for a stroll, as with
watermelons." When the bombs burst, "the panes in the neighboring houses
are shattered," and "the dark blue feathers" of the "bright falcon" are
set on fire. "As there were no Kostroma peasants on hand to aid the
emperor--no Komisaroffs or Susanins," adds the ballad, with local pride
(alluding to the legend of Ivan Susanin saving the first Romanoff Tzar
from the Poles in 1612, which forms the subject of the famous opera by
Glinka, "Life for the Tzar"), "he laid himself down in the bosom of his
mother (earth)." The second ballad is "The Monument-Not Made-with-Hands
to the Tzar Liberator"--the compound adjective here referring to that in
the title of a favorite _ikona_, or Holy Picture, which corresponds to
the one known in western Europe as the imprint of the Saviour's face on
St. Veronica's kerchief. There are four stanzas, of six lines each, of
which the third runs as follows:

He is our Liberator and our father!
And we will erect a monument of hearts
Whose cross, by its gleaming 'mid the clouds,
Shall transmit the memory to young children and the babes in arms,
And this shall be unto ages of ages
So long as the world and man shall exist!

In southwestern Russia, where the ancient epic songs of the Elder Heroes
and the Kieff Cycle originated, the memory of them has died out, owing
to the devastation of southern Russia by the Tatars in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, and the decay of its civilization under
Lithuanian sway in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the
sixteenth century the population of southern Russia reorganized itself
in the forms of kazak communes, and fabricated for itself a fresh cycle
of epic legends, which replaced those of Kieff; and there the _kobzars_
(professional minstrels who accompany their songs on the _kabza_, a
mandolin-like, twelve-stringed instrument) celebrate the deeds of a new
race of kazak heroes. But in the lonely wildernesses of the northeast,
whither the Tatar invasion dro