ance of a rare poetical beauty, which has been fully appreciated in England by Ralston, and in France by the historian Rambaud.
"LAY OF IGOR'S RAID"
And yet Russia has not her Iliad. There has been no poet to inspire himself with the expolits of Iliyá, Dobrýnia, Sádko, Tchurílo, and the others, and to make out of them a poem similar to the epics of Homer, or the "Kalevála" of the Finns. This has been done with only one cycle of traditions: in the poem, The Lay of Igor's Raid (Slóvo o Polkú Igoreve).
This poem was composed at the end of the twelfth century, or early in the thirteenth (its full manuscript, destroyed during the conflagration of Moscow in 1812, dated from the fourteenth or the fifteenth century) . It was undoubtedly the work of one author, and for its beauty and poetical form it stands by the side of the Song of the Nibelungs, or the Song of Roland. It relates a real fact that did happen in 1185. Igor, a prince of Kíeff, starts with his drúzhina (schola) of warriors to make a raid on the Pólovtsi, who occupied the prairies of South-eastern Russia, and continually raided the Russian villages. All sorts of bad omens are seen on the march through the prairies—the sun is darkened and casts its shadow on the band of Russian warriors; the animals give different warnings; but Igor exclaims: "Brothers and friends: Better to fall dead than be prisoners of the Pólovtsi! Let us march to the blue waters of the Don. Let us break our lances against those of the Pólovtsi. And either I leave there my head, or I will drink the water of the Don from my golden helmet." The march is resumed, the Pólovtsi are met with, and a great battle is fought.
The description of the battle, in which all Nature takes part—the eagles and the wolves, and the foxes who bark after the red shields of the Russians—is admirable. Igor's band is defeated. "From sunrise to sunset, and from sunset to sunrise, the steel arrows flew, the swords clashed on the helmets, the lances were broken in a far-away land—the land of the Pólovtsi." "The black earth under the hoofs of the
