SOURCE: "A Cossack Poet," in Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. LIII, No. 318, April, 1886, pp. 458-464.

In the following essay, Mor fill introduces Shevchenko to a western European audience, focusing on his life, his political views, and the idyllic character of his poetry.

I propose in the following pages to introduce to the notice of my readers a poet whose name has hardly been heard in the western parts of Europe. This is the Cossack Taras Shevchenko, whose funeral in 1861 was followed by so many thousands of his countrymen, and whose grave—a tumulus surmounted by a large iron cross, near Kaniov on the Dnieper—has been called the Mecca of the South Russian revolutionists. Shevchenko has become the national poet of the Malo-Russians, a large division of the Slavonic family amounting to ten millions, and speaking what has been called a Russian dialect, but is more justly styled by Micklosich...