studied restraint and reserve. The garden scene between Lisa and
Lavretsky is the very ecstasy of passion, although, like the two
characters, it is marked by a pure and chaste beauty of word and
action, that seems to prove that Love is something divine. Only the
truly virtuous really understand passion--just as the sorrows of men
are deeper than the sorrows of children, even though the latter be
accompanied by more tears. Those who believe that the master passion
of love expresses itself by floods of words or by abominable imagery,
will understand Turgenev as little as they understand life. In reading
the few pages in which the lovers meet by night in the garden, one
feels almost like an intruder--as one feels at the scene of
reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia. It is the very essence of
intimacy--the air is filled with something high and holy.

* In the original, "A Nobleman's Nest."

Lisa is the greatest of all Turgenev's great heroines. No one can help
being better for knowing such a girl. She is not very beautiful, she
is not very accomplished, not even very quick-witted; but she has eine
schone Seele. There is nothing regal about her; she never tries to
queen it in the drawing-room. She is not proud, high-spirited, and
haughty; she does not constantly "draw herself up to her full height,"
a species of gymnastics in great favour with most fiction-heroines.
But she draws all men unto herself. She is beloved by the two opposite
extremes of manhood--Panshin and Lavretsky. Lacking beauty, wit, and
learning, she has an irrepressible and an irresistible virginal
charm--the exceedingly rare charm of youth when it seeks not its own.
When she appears on the scene, the pages of the book seem illuminated,
and her smile is a benediction. She is exactly the kind of woman to be
loved by Lavretsky, and to be desired by a rake like Panshin. For a