"And on God's world there lay the deep And heavy spell of utter sleep, Although the landrail called, and I Could hear the trill of the dragonfly Or else the lisping of the stream ... Only a snake, with a yellow gleam Like golden lettering inlaid From hilt to tip upon a blade, Was rustling, for the grass was dry, And in the loose sand cautiously It slid, and then began to spring And roll itself into a ring, Then, as though struck by sudden fear, Made haste to dart and disappear."
Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and delirium overtake him, and he fancies that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, where speckled fishes are playing in the crystal waters. One of them nestles close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby, unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the Erl King's daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of the Caucasus.
To his two masterpieces, _The Demon_ and _Mtsyri_, he was to add a third: _The Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprichnik (bodyguardsman), and the Merchant Kalashnikov_. The Oprichnik insults the Merchant's wife, and the Merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him, and is executed for it. This poem is written as a folk-story, in the style of the _Byliny_, and it in no way resembles a _pastiche_. It equals, if it does not surpass, Pushkin's _Boris Godunov_ as a realistic vision of the past; and as an epic tale, for simplicity, absolute appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it. Besides these larger poems, Lermontov wrote a quantity of short lyrics, many of which, such as "The Sail," "The Angel," "The Prayer," every Russian child knows by heart.
When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov's romantic work, and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the West--from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda--we find that in Lermontov's work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, and descriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the "intense inane" of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us into a different world: for instance, Heine's quite ordinary adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.