and of thanksgiving,
  Till from the embers leaped the dying flame to behold them,
  And the hills of the river were filled with reverberant echoes,—­
  Echoes that out of the years and the distance stole to me hither,
  While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,—­
  Echoes that mingled and fainted and fell with the fluttering murmurs
  In the hearts of the hushing bells, as from island to island
  Swooned the sound on the wide lagoons into palpitant silence.

* * * * *

THE DEVELOPMENT AND OVERTHROW OF THE RUSSIAN SERF-SYSTEM.

Close upon the end of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite ideas of Right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great, and compressed into a code.

Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time:  for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, the knout and death.

But hidden in this tough mass was one law of greater import than all others.  Thereby were all peasants forbidden to leave the lands they were then tilling, except during the eight days before and after Saint George’s day.  This provision sprang from Ivan’s highest views of justice and broadest views of political economy; the nobles received it with plaudits, which have found echoes even in these days;[A] the peasants received it with no murmurs which History has found any trouble in drowning.

[Footnote A:  See Gerebtzoff, Histoire de la Civilisation en Russie.]

Just one hundred years later, there sat upon the Muscovite throne, as nominal Tzar, the weakling Feodor I.; but behind the throne stood, as real Tzar, hard, strong Boris Godounoff.

Looking forward to Feodor’s death, Boris makes ready to mount the throne; and he sees—­what all other “Mayors of the Palace,” climbing into the places of faineant kings, have seen—­that he must link to his fortunes the fortunes of some strong body in the nation; he breaks, however, from the general rule among usurpers,—­bribing the Church,—­and determines to bribe the nobility.

The greatest grief of the Muscovite nobles seemed to be that the peasants could escape from their oppression by the emigration allowed at Saint George’s day.

Boris saw his opportunity:  he cut off the privilege of Saint George’s day; the peasant was fixed to the soil forever.  No Russian law ever directly enslaved the peasantry,[B] but, through this decree of Boris, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants upon it, just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges.

[Footnote B:  Haxthausen.]

To this the peasants submitted, but over this wrong History has not been able to drown their sighs; their proverbs and ballads make Saint George’s day representative of all ill-luck and disappointment.

A few years later, Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor.  He issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts.  This completed the work, and Russia, which never had the benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism’s worst curse,—­a serf-caste bound to the glebe.