text:  The popular superstitions of the Sclavonic races though naturally possessing a tone and local colouring of their own and modified by the nature which they reflect are neither less graceful nor less fertile in poetry than the delicate mythology so exquisitely embodied by the great German or the yet greater Italian: and the poem of "Ruslan and Liudmila"--the result of Pushkin's bold and happy experiment--may be said to have been the very first embodiment of Russian fancy at least the first such embodiment exhibited under a form sufficiently European to enable readers who were not Russians to appreciate and admire