barges up and down the river.

The rattling of the convicts' chains as they passed; the songs of the
_burlaki_; the pale, sorrowful face of his mother as she walked alone in
the linden avenues of the garden, often shedding tears over a letter she
read, which was headed by a coronet and written in a fine, delicate
hand; the spreading green fields, the broad mighty river, the deep blue
skies of Russia,--such were the reminiscences which Nekrassov retained
from his earliest childhood. He loved his sad young mother with a
childish passion, and in after years he was wont to relate how jealous
he had been of that letter[1] she read so often, which always seemed to
fill her with a sorrow he could not understand, making her at moments
even forget that he was near her.

The sight and knowledge of deep human suffering, framed in the soft
voluptuous beauty of nature in central Russia, could not fail to sow the
seed of future poetical powers in the soul of an emotional child. His
mother, who had been bred on Shakespeare, Milton, and the other great
poets and writers of the West, devoted her solitary life to the
development of higher intellectual tendencies in her gifted little son.
And from an early age he made attempts at verse. His mother has
preserved for the world his first little poem, which he presented to her
when he was seven years of age, with a little heading, roughly to the
following effect:

My darling Mother, look at this,
I did the best I could in it,
Please read it through and tell me if
You think there's any good in it.