And seen in all. . . Onegin's face.
10
And then her warm imagination
Perceives herself as
Some favourite author's fond creation:
Clarissa,* Julia,* or Delphine.*
She wanders with her borrowed lovers
Through silent woods and so discovers
Within a book her heart's extremes,
Her secret passions, and her dreams.
She sighs . . . and in her soul possessing
Another's joy, another's pain,
She whispers in a soft refrain
The letter she would send caressing
Her hero . . . who was none the less
No Grandison in Russian dress.
11
Time was, with grave and measured diction,
A fervent author used to show
The hero in his work of fiction
Endowed with bright perfection's glow.
He'd furnish his beloved child
Forever hounded and reviled
With tender soul and manly grace,
Intelligence and handsome face.
And nursing noble passion's rages,
The ever dauntless hero stood
Prepared to die for love of good;
And in the novel's final pages,
Deceitful vice was made to pay
And honest virtue won the day.
12
But now our minds have grown inactive,
We're put to sleep by talk of 'sin';
Our novels too make vice attractive,
And even there it seems to win.
It's now the British Muse's fables
That lie on maidens' bedside tables
And haunt their dreams. They worship now
The Vampire with his pensive brow,
Or gloomy Melmoth, lost and pleading,
The Corsair, or the Wandering Jew,
And enigmatic Sbogar* too.
Lord Byron, his caprice succeeding,
Cloaked even hopeless egotism
In saturnine romanticism.
13
But what's the point? I'd like to know it.
Perhaps, my friends, by fate's decree,
