She died of quick consumption shortly afterwards.

This grief affected the young man's whole career, and many of his poems were inspired by it.

He began to publish his poems while still in school, being already threatened with pulmonary trouble, on account of which he had been sent to the Caucasus at the expense of the government, where he spent a year.

In 1882 he graduated from the military school, and was appointed an officer in a regiment stationed at Kronstadt.

There he lived for two years, and some of his best poems belong to this epoch: "No, Easier 'Tis for Me to Think that Thou Art Dead," "Herostrat," "Dreams," "The Brilliant Hall Has Silent Grown," "All Hath Come to Pass," and so forth.