patriarch had really given birth to them. 'Yes, it is he, indeed!' cried
Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which
the springtime and this new life gave him . . . 'No, my life cannot end
at thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me,
others must know it too! Pierre and that "slip" of a girl, who would
have fled into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour
theirs, and their lives must mingle with mine!'"

In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy's
love of Nature is often-times expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic
and the prophet's mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the poet in
him wakes when, "with a feeling akin to ecstasy," he looks up from his
smooth-running sledge at "the enchanting, starry winter sky overhead,"
or in early spring feels on a ramble "intoxicated by the beauty of the
morning," while he notes that the buds are swelling on the lilacs, and
"the birds no longer sing at random," but have begun to converse.

But though such allusions abound in his diary and private
correspondence, we must turn to "The Cossacks," and "Conjugal Happiness"
for the exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give those early
romances their fresh idyllic charm.

What is interesting to note is that this artistic freshness and joy in
Nature coexisted with acute intermittent attacks of spiritual lassitude.
In "The Cossacks," the doubts, the mental gropings of Olenine--whose
personality but thinly veils that of Tolstoy--haunt him betimes even
among the delights of the Caucasian woodland; Serge, the fatalistic
hero of "Conjugal Happiness," calmly acquiesces in the inevitableness
of "love's sad satiety" amid the scent of roses and the songs of
nightingales.