with inspiration, happiness, and beauty; it swelled and melted away;
it touched on all that is precious, mysterious, and holy on earth. It
breathed of deathless sorrow and mounted dying away to the heavens."

Elena, the heroine of "On the Eve," resembles Lisa in the absolute
integrity of her mind, and in her immovable sincerity; but in all
other respects she is a quite different person. The difference is
simply the difference between the passive and the active voice. Lisa
is static, Elena dynamic. The former's ideal is to be good, the
latter's is to do good. Elena was strenuous even as a child, was made
hotly angry by scenes of cruelty or injustice, and tried to help
everything, from stray animals to suffering men and women. As Turgenev
expresses it, "she thirsted for action." She is naturally
incomprehensible to her conservative and ease-loving parents, who have
a well-founded fear that she will eventually do something shocking.
Her father says of her, rather shrewdly: "Elena Nikolaevna I don't
pretend to understand. I am not elevated enough for her. Her heart is
so large that it embraces all nature down to the last beetle or frog,
everything in fact except her own father." In a word, Elena is
unconventional, the first of the innumerable brood of the vigorous,
untrammelled, defiant young women of modern fiction, who puzzle their
parents by insisting on "living their own life." She is only a faint
shadow, however, of the type so familiar to-day in the pages of Ibsen,
Bjornson, and other writers. Their heroines would regard Elena as
timid and conventional, for with all her self-assertion, she still
believes in God and marriage, two ideas that to our contemporary
emancipated females are the symbols of slavery.

Elena, with all her virtues, completely lacks the subtle charm of
Lisa; for an aggressive, independent, determined woman will perhaps