The sight and knowledge of deep human suffering, framed in the soft
voluptuous beauty of nature in central Russia, could not fail to sow the
seed of future poetical powers in the soul of an emotional child. His
mother, who had been bred on Shakespeare, Milton, and the other great
poets and writers of the West, devoted her solitary life to the
development of higher intellectual tendencies in her gifted little son.
And from an early age he made attempts at verse. His mother has
preserved for the world his first little poem, which he presented to her
when he was seven years of age, with a little heading, roughly to the
following effect:
My darling Mother, look at this,
I did the best I could in it,
Please read it through and tell me if
You think there's any good in it.
The early life of the little Nekrassov was passed amid a series of
contrasting pictures. His father, when he had abandoned his military
calling and settled upon his estate, became the Chief of the district
police. He would take his son Nicholas with him in his trap as he drove
from village to village in the fulfilment of his new duties. The
continual change of scenery during their frequent journeys along country
roads, through forests and valleys, past meadows and rivers, the various
types of people they met with, broadened and developed the mind of
little Nekrassov, just as the mind of the child Ruskin was formed and
expanded during his journeys with his father.
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