A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING

AR

S VIRTUOUS men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

"The breath goes now," and some say "No";

So let us melt and make no noise,

No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,

Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do,

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

Yet do not: I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two or three.

LOVE'S GROWTH

SCARCE believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,

Because it doth endure

Vicissitude and season as the grass;

Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore

My love was infinite, if spring make it more.
But if this medicine love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence

But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense, And of the sun his working vigor borrow,

Love's not so pure and abstract as they use

To say, which have no mistress but their muse,

But as all else, being elemented too,

Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is grown;

As in the firmament

Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love-deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love's awakened root do bud out now.
If, as in water stirred, more circles be

Produced by one, love such additions take,

Thou, like so many spheres, but one heaven make, For they are all concentric unto thee;

And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get

New taxes and remit them not in peace,

No winter shall abate the spring's increase.

4778

But come bad chance,

And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to advance.

When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,
But sigh'st my soul away;

When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,

My life's blood doth decay.

It cannot be

That thou lov'st me as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou waste;
Thou art the best of me.

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,

And may thy fears fulfill:
But think that we

Are but turned aside to sleep:
They who one another keep

Alive, ne'er parted be.

4779

FEODOR MIKHAILOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY

(1821-1881)

BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD

N CERTAIN respects Dostoevsky is the most characteristically national of Russian writers. Precisely for that reason, his work does not appeal to so wide a circle outside of his own country as does the work of Turgénieff and Count L. N. Tolstoy. This result flows not only from the natural bent of his mind and temperament, but also from the peculiar vicissitudes of his life as compared with the comparatively even tenor of their existence, and the circumstances of the time in which he lived. These circumstances, it is true, were felt by the writers mentioned; but practically they affected him far more deeply than they did the others, with their rather one-sided training; and his fellow-countrymen-especially the young of both sexes -were not slow to express their appreciation of the fact. special domain was the one which Turgénieff and Tolstoy did not understand, and have touched not at all, or only incidentally, the great middle class of society, or what corresponds thereto in Russia.

His

FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Through his father, Mikhail Andréevitch Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovitch belonged to the class of "nobles," - that is to say, to the gentry; through his mother, to the respectable, well-to-do merchant class, which is still distinct from the other, and was even more so during the first half of the present century; and in personal appearance he was a typical member of the peasant class. The father was resident physician in the Marie Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, having entered the civil service at the end of the war of 1812, during which he had served as a physician in the army. In the very contracted apartment which he occupied in the hospital, Feodor was born-one of a family of seven children, all of whom, with the exception of the eldest and the youngest, were born there -on October 30th (November 11th), 1821. The parents were very upright, well-educated, devoutly religious people; and as Feodor expressed it many years later to his elder brother, after their father