To pass with reasonable men

For a fictitious misanthrope,

A visionary mortified,

Or monster of Satanic pride,

Or e'en the "Demon" of my strain.(81)

Oneguine - take him up again -

In duel having killed his friend

And reached, with nought his mind to engage,

The twenty-sixth year of his age,

Wearied of leisure in the end,

Without profession, business, wife,

He knew not how to spend his life.

[Note 81: The "Demon," a short poem by Pushkin which at its first appearance created some excitement in Russian society. A more appropriate, or at any rate explanatory title, would have been the Tempter. It is descriptive of the first manifestation of doubt and cynicism in his youthful mind, allegorically as the visits of a "demon." Russian society was moved to embody this imaginary demon in the person of a certain friend of Pushkin's. This must not be confounded with Lermontoff's poem bearing the same title upon which Rubinstein's new opera, "Il Demonio," is founded.]

XIII.

Him a disquietude did seize,

A wish from place to place to roam,

A very troublesome disease,

In some a willing martyrdom.

Abandoned he his country seat,

Of woods and fields the calm retreat,

Where every day before his eyes

A blood-bespattered shade would rise,

And aimless journeys did commence -

But still remembrance to him clings,

His travels like all other things

Inspired but weariness intense;

Returning, from his ship amid

A ball he fell as Tchatzki did.(82)

[Note 82: Tchatzki, one of the principal characters in Griboyedoff's celebrated comedy "Woe from Wit" (Gore ot Ouma).]

XIV.

Behold, the crowd begins to stir,

A whisper runs along the hall,

A lady draws the hostess near,

Behind her a grave general.

Her manners were deliberate,

Reserved, but not inanimate,