Books of travel one reads more and more with a sense of weariness, for the art of making one see and feel the countries described is surely an exceedingly rare one. There are often pages of fine description, there are adventures, there is the interest of obstacles and difficulties overcome, and there are⁠—maps. And in the end the reader’s mind becomes itself a composite map in which the various countries lie jumbled up together with colours like a patchwork quilt. For, as a rule, the writer describes the detail of the scenery instead of the more valuable interpretative effect the scenery produces upon himself. Yet it is this latter that makes one see and feel the country, and the writer should boldly tell about himself, without false modesty. Then, if he has the poet’s heart in him as well, he introduces living pictures into our mind. We close the book, having really travelled with him. He has widened our experience and feeling, not merely added to our knowledge of facts and names and distances, however finely described. It is, we claim, the poet’s rare prerogative to accomplish this very high achievement. It is a keen delight to recognise it, for the emotion roused in reading such a book is the same as the emotion that good poetry stirs; and whether you come across it in its simplest form, as in the Man-Eaters of Tsavo, in more passionate, vivid shape, as in Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude, or in its still more highly-finished aspect, as in Hilaire Belloc’s wonderful presentment of the very souls of towns and places, the result is one and the same: the thrill and beauty of good poetry. In Undiscovered Russia, Mr. Stephen Graham has written a haunting book of travel that might equally well have been in the form of poetry, for, from beginning to end, it is a genuine poem. He did this a year ago in his delightful Vagabond in the Caucasus. He has done it again in Undiscovered Russia, only with more passion, greater skill and a finer perception of the beauty of scenery and of human nature than before. He has told us of his long journey on foot for many weeks (some of it in shoes of birch-bark!) from Archangel on the White Sea down to Rostov on the Don in a long, beautiful poem of adventure and delight that sets this book among the very best of its rare kind. And he has done this well because he felt it deeply, and gives his feelings with an honest modesty that is both engaging and illuminating. “I love Russia. She is something more to me than my native land. I have lived among beautiful people leading serene and tranquil lives far from the Western hurly-burly. These have been so mystically pure that I could never be quite sure that they had not foreseen my coming in a dream. England knows not such. To me they are a revelation of love.” Here speaks the poet who feels the thing from within himself, not merely observes it from outside. “You wish to see Russia as it remains in the old unknown parts,” a woman said to him; “then you should go to the North, for there all that Russia ever was is conserved in the forests as in ice⁠—in the provinces of Archangel and Vologda⁠—where there are no railways and no intercourse with the advanced world of the twentieth century.” And he went, slept with the peasants and the hunters, lived with the boatmen and the bargemen, tramped with revolutionary students, and took into his own heart the strange, wild spirit of this enormous country that he has now given out in this volume of thrilling beauty and delight. You see with him the weird wonder of the northern White Night, where for two months the sun is above the horizon; you feel the awful mystery of the leagues of untrodden forest; you catch fish with him at midnight on the broad Dwina while the sun shines hotly on the waters; you hear the balalaikas twang in villages so remote from civilisation that the people have but a single, common surname, applied also to the hamlet itself; and you share strange gospels, taste ancient superstitions, hear the footfall of forest ghosts and devils, or go into the heart of it to pluck the flower of happiness that blossoms at midnight on the Eve of St. John. “I gave my heart to Russia. She is a woman. Behind her eyes are forests of pines and unexplored darkness; in her hand she carries blossoms. She is the mother of nations.” “How do you feel Russia?” Vassily Vassilievitch, the painter, whose pictures add so greatly to the book, enquired of him. “Do not answer ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘interesting’; you understand what I mean.” And Mr. Graham’s answer was like this: “I feel her old, fragrant, melancholy, like the black earth.” One feels, in reading these pages, that the volume is peculiarly well named, and that the real Russia is as yet almost entirely undiscovered to Western eyes.