Below is the pit,
echoing with the mocking laughter of hell.
echoing with the mocking laughter of hell.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 163
We know how the Polish Rising, projected in
the forties of the nineteenth century on democratic
lines, was pushed by Austrian machinations into a
different movement, and ended in the Galician'
massacres. Krasinski's piercingly clear political
acumen was never obscured by the mystic tend-
ency of his mind. He saw whither a class agitation
would be likely to lead a nation groaning as
was Poland under abnormal and intolerable con-
ditions. Before the disaster befell, trembling for
the moral danger that threatened his country,
Krasinski sent forth a passionate cry to those of
his fellow Poles, who were working a national'
rising as a social revolution, to stay before it was
too late. That warning is his Psalm oflLove. The
Psalm of Love is a plea to the human race, no less .
than to one people, to shun the works of bloodshed
and violence: the poet's attestation that one
only element can save a nation, namely, love.
"Carry your arms against hell. Slay the black
brood of demons. The guillotine and pillage are
the weapons of the human race in its infancy; rage,
the liberty, not of man, but of the beast. Now is
the time to take to oneself the toil of angels, the
time to cast off every stain, and by that very act
to conquer slavery. Destruction is not action.
There is but one truth, divine, fruitful in deed;
transfiguration through love. "
With his soul's whole strength, he pleads that the
Poland he loved to call holy, who he believed was
to prove to mankind that virtue and love are
stronger than brute force, must never, by stooping
to unworthiness and violence, lose her destined
vocation. .
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? 164
POLAND
"Who changeth sorrow into crime, who forgeth
fetters into knives, not into swords, cursed be he. "
"When geniuses have descended to this world,
they have led their cause by a different road. No
one of them was a dictator of the ages through
murder and the torture chamber. Rather, they
live in peril, in the end they die, but their victory
lasts for ever. Only the weak soul chooses butchery.
His name is Marius, his name is Robespierre. "
Then he bids such of his countrymen who
would sweep away the ancient nobility of Poland
to look upon what the latter have done for their
country. They have died for Poland in battle. They
have perished for her in Siberia. And who, asks
the poet, could we find who are faultless ? " Only
one, He only Who was man and God; and from
the sinner another man soars upward through
suffering, changed as the phoenix, and immortal. "
Search the world; the Alps, the waters of the
Mediterranean, the Spanish sierras, the snows of
Russia, the battlefields of France, where the
Polish nobles have sown "the seed of future
Poland, the god-like grain, their own blood;
and you are the children of that pain. " They
lead that nation which, far from thrusting men
down to the pit, is to uplift them as she mounts
ever higher. But near her stands the tempter.
Evil thoughts "grow where there are chains. "
Siberia and the knout are nothing to the poison
sown by slavery. "But the corrupted spirit of a
nation, that only is the pain of pains " ; conscience
warped by a mass of suffering, reason confused by
the' wandering of perverted pride, crime repre-
levied as virtue, children taught to look on murder
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 165
as a glorious deed, the sister bidding the brother
take up the assassin's dagger, the native country
turned into a hell.
"Oh, my holy one, abjure these delusions, the
phantoms of an evil moment. Thou wilt not rid
thee of thy ancient faith, that he only can cut
through his chains who is anointed with the sign
of virtue, that to be a Pole upon this earth is to
live nobly and to God. "
The Anonymous Poet reads hope from the
very afflictions that thronged around his nation
on every side.
"My Poland! Holy Poland! Thou standest
on the threshold of thy victory. This is the last
term of thy sorrows. Let it be only seen that thou
art the eternal foe of evil. Then shall the chains of
death be shattered, and thou wilt be assumed to
heaven, because even in death thou wast with
God. "
In the final moment when death struggles with
life, when dying lips sob out the last accents of
doubt and lamentation:
"In the strength of thy martyrdom overcome
that moment, conquer that pain; and thou shalt
rise again, thou shalt rise as the queen of the
Slavonian fields. "
Then the poet turns to the ideal of Messianistic
longings; the celestial vision of a spiritualized
country.
"Let them who love thee gaze on thy face as
on the spring. Be the mistress who straightens
the crooked things of the world, the leader of
universal love. Blot out all sin, dry all tears, rule
over the world of souls, spurn the government
>
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? i66
POLAND
of flesh. Unpolluted, carry the breath of the
Lord. "
But that spiritual conquest is not reached yet.
The powers of darkness are still close at hand.
"Fling away your murderous weapons," is the
reiteration that tolls all through the concluding
verses of the psalm. "Against hell carry your
arms. / Slay the black brood of demons. " And, when
the word of the Lord shall thunder forth, " then
forward in the name of God" to the holy rising,
from which " God will not turn away His face. "
So ends the poem which Count Tarnowski
places among the world's splendid failures of
patriotic pleading,* written to save a nation, and
written in vain.
The catastrophe, greater even than what Kras-
inski had foretold, came to pass in 1846. Krasinski
( beheld the country, whose purity and suffering
. he had promised would confer upon her the
heralding of a new spiritual epoch, dragged down
to shame. His anguish brought him to the jjoint
of death. From that time he was prematurely
aged. Rent by the distress of his soul under which
his bodily frame came near to sinking, in the
agony of those days when Galicia was soaked in
blood spilt by her own children, he could still,
he did still, cling to the conviction of his heart.
He could still tell the beloved friend to whom he
poured out his thoughts that the idea would
conquer. f He could still, apparently a dying man,
tear from his pain words of consolation for his
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
t Letters of Zygmunt Krmsinski. W >>\. I. To Constantine Gaszynski,
March 1st, 1846.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 167 /
people. And so he gave his nation her Psalmfof"
Grief. f
Slowacki, formerly Krasinski's friend, had, in a
poem of extraordinary artistic beauty, made~
mockery, not untouched by a personal gibe *at
the Anonymous Poet's private tragedy, of the
anti-revolutionary tendency of the Psalm of Love.
The Psalm of Grief is Krasinski's justification
against his brother-poet's attack. In grave and
dignified accents, with the generosity of one who(
Sassed over the bitterness of an individual wound,
Irasinski answers the poem that he himself
praised as an ornament to the Polish language.
Would, says he, that he had been the false prophet,
and that his challenger had been the true one\T
On the lines of the Psalm of Love, he refutes the
revolutionary tenets that he believed could only"
bring a nation to ruin. The spirit and the flesh
ever war, the idea against the brute beast, the
angel against the tiger. In the combat and con-
vulsion of the world, who shall redeem us? Who
shall bring harmony into a disordered chaos?
He Who knows neither the burden of the' body
nor the sickness of the soul: the Holy Ghost.
Beneath His rule blood will be shed no more. "In
the morning He waketh to hope the people
who slumber. " He shall make the very shadows
"as silver, till dawn becomes midday. "
Brotherly love will save those who are trembling
on the very brink of the abyss. Parted from each
other, they are damned. United, they are redeemed.
The radiance of the Holy Ghost conquers the
curse of centuries. The soul,ruled by Him, "shall
feel the love of toil and the courage of suffering. "
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? 168' / POLAND
She shall " lift men from the mire and hide their
shame. Unabased in the midst of vileness, loving
evef' in the midst of trials, her heart will become
as steel, and her eyes shall weep for every human
grief. " /Rhus through love and pain shall the soul
vwork her way to God. Even with the horror of
r what had recently befallen fresh upon him; when
v to keep hope alive, where every exterior event
incited to despair, meant a life and death struggle,
the^Anonymous Poet spoke a message of virility
i and life. He bade his people be the nation to rise
'-5* above moral stain, whose weapon shall not be the
i -' assassin's but Christ's, and who will' therefore
conquer in the power of Christ; whose triumph
'shall be commensurate with her anguish and' her
'. love. "Thus she riseth from the dead": are the
^ . last words of the Psalm of Grief. 'Ti '. ^
With the Psalm of Good WilU-tS^r-tr^-
- j ^ inski's Psalms of the Future close. I^hisj'^he noblest
^~ of Krasinski's poems, is-^e seal^f his life's ? work,
'the culmination of tfc^great prophetical poetry
"^of Poland. His own pain had taught Krasinski -his.
message to his nation. The Psalm of Good Will
breathes the sadness and majesty of a farewell to
his people, from one who had won to his haven
after suffering and struggle. In its long, sweeping
cadences the hymn reveals that the poet had
looked into the mysteries of grief only to rise
'victorious above them; that he had found in
-,Jcreath no^tirig^but resurrection^ His prayer is not
''~~for his fiaiion's glory, not for her material triumph,
but for thatiwhich will bring her both: for good
will. . 1
Now that Thy judgment has thundered in
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 169
heaven on the two thousand years that have past,
amidst that judgment, grant us, oh, Lord, that
by our holy deeds we may rise from death. " ,
This is the petition of which the poet cannot
weary, to which the stanzas of the Psalm modu-
late as into some grand closing chord.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst'
give, oh, Lord," sings the son of the unhappiest
of nations. With the eyes of mystical devotion,
he reads in her past a history of love. " Thou hast
given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord". ;
for, when thrust down from the land of the living
by dismen\berment, "Thou didst keep us who
were dead living in the field of war. We were not,
and we '*vere. . . . Thou hast given us all that
Thou oqulast give, oh, Lord; a pure life, there-
fore worthy of the cross, and the cross that brings
us to Thy stars; Earth Thou didst take from us>,
and send down heaven, and Thy heart shelters
us on every side. But our free will Thou hadst to
leave to us. Without ourselves, even Thou canst
not save us; for so hast Thou ennobled man and
every nation that Thy thought, suspended in
heaven, awaits the choice of man or nation for
their several roads. " " Thou hast*¥ us all that
Thou courdst give, oh, Lord "; tne example of
Jerusalem, " in whom Thy love for so long dwelt,"
and who is throneless and widowed -because she
desired revenge, and does not understand the
might of Christ's cross. "Thou hast given us all
that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord"; foj we have
seen how the works of death bring destruction,
not on those against whom they are directed,- but
on those who handle them. v
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? 170 POLAND
Here ends the tranquil and devout hymn of
praise. Behind Krasinski's promises, there is always
the reality of an exacting warfare. If Poland is to
be a. chosen nation, the harder must be her struggle
to justify her calling. The Psalm becomes a sup-
plication for victory in the battle.
"W. e are above the abyss, on the narrow
straits. Our wings are sprouting to the resurrec-
'don, our lips are parted for the cry of joy. From
the blue skies, as though from Thy bosom, golden
shafts of dawn, as though Thy sheltering arms, are
spreading from the heavens to us on earth below,
to take from our foreheads the load of agelong
sorrow. All is ready, and the east is all aflame, and
angels watching. "
But from the other side, heaving to our feet,
rises the darkness: "the pit, eternal death, where
Thou art not," where are all things evil. If we
turn^one backward glance towards it, one step to
meet it, then "the light of dawn will pale upon
our brows, Thy Son shall shed no tear for us, and
the Holy Spirit shall not console us. "
"Have mercy, Lord, defend us, be with us! "
We stand alone to face the final moment. None
may help us. Our destiny is in our own hands.
Then the name, with which "upon their lips
millions of Polish souls have gone to death," rises
in the poet's heart: the name of Mary. He sees
her, not with the rapture of his earlier vision in
Dawn, leading in triumph a host of warriors, but
as a suppliant, kneeling at the throne of her Son,
pleading for a suffering nation. He sees her above
the stars that turn to her in prayer, above suns
and the Milky Way, and behind her, weeping, are
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 'rj\
the souls of the Polish dead.
Below is the pit,
echoing with the mocking laughter of hell. Its
winds roar in our ears, the foam of its waves
blinds our eyes by which it would drag us down to s,
death. "Oh, vain one, it seeth not what /is being
wrought on high. Oh, vain one, it seeth not that
its rage is nought when such a heart for us is
wrung. " And the poet then pours out his last
prayer for his people:
"Oh, Lord, Lord, then not for hope--as a
flower is it strewn : then not for the destruction of
our foes--their destruction dawns on to-morrow's
clouds: not for the weapons of rule--from the
tempests they will fall to us: not for any help--
Thou hast opened already the field of events
before us: but amidst the terrible convulsion of
these events, we beseech Thee only for a pure will
within ourselves, oh, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
"Oh, Thou most dear, hidden but visible
beyond the veils of the transparent worlds, Thou
present everywhere, immortal, holy! Thou Who
commandedst the being of man that, poor in
strength, and little in his birth, he should to an
angel grow by might of sacrifice; and to our
Polish nation didst ordain that she should lead
the nations into love and peace ! We beseech Thee,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we, suspended
between Thy kingdom and the pit, we beseech
Thee with our foreheads sunk to earth, our temples
bathed in the breathing of Thy spring, surrounded
with the wheels of shattered times and perishing
governments, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! we
beseech Thee create in us a pure heart, make
new our thoughts within us, root out from our
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? 172
POLAND
souls tie tares of sacrilegious falsehood, and give
us the gift, ^eternal among Thy gifts--give us
good will! " v
One . only word more remained to Krasinski to
speak to his people, and then his work was done.
In the thick of the terrible events of 1846, when,
weighed down by physical weakness and mental
agony, he could scarcely set pen to paper, he had
struggled fcV&end his nation the message she
needed. '
'. ' ? )h, pray for me to God," he wrote to Delfina
Potocka, as his spirit wrestled against a mind and
body too wearied to obey its bidding. "I feel
nothing egotistic in that desire. For Poland"--
whom even in a private letter he, calls by a feigned
name--" is/ bent beneath all the winds. She
implores, she implores for counsel. "* Dis'satisfiedr*'
with what he wrote; JCrasifiski did- taot publish
the poem in question till 1851, when it came out
und,er the. title ^Resurx^ctup^l It stands forth as his'
supreme ^ctory ov. er^' pessimism <<id d<<apair.
WhaxA he. asks; is this world but"a "cemetery of
ft^s, of blood and mire? This world is eternal
Golgotha to each. The spirit writhes in vain
against its pain. There is no halting place in the--
tempest of this life. Fate mocks us every moment.
Death is close ; and only far away, somewhere on 1
a later wave of ages, resurrection.
"Then must we grow numb, be petrified, be
without heart, become as murderers among the
murderers, among the criminals be criminal our-
selves? Lie, hate, and slay, and mock. We will
* Works ofZysrmunt Krasinski. Jubilee Edition, Cracow, 1912.
Vol. VI. p. 369.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 173
give back to the world what it gives us. Let/us
eat and drink, caress the body and abase the mind.
So shall we be counted among the stupid and the /
happy.
"Oh, let it not be so ! My soul, draw back, oh,
stay! Not such a weapon for those who would
shorten evil. . Only one power in the world, the
quiet strength of sacrifice, conquers an oppressive
fate.
"Oh, know thyself for what thou art. Crave
not for the mastery which is His in heaven, nor
choose to be as the brute beast fattening on the
fields of. pasture. On this side the grave, before
. the resurrection dawns, be thou an. unbroken
masterpiece of will, be patience, mistress of mis-
fortune, that slowly buildeth up an edifice from
nought. Be that defeat, of distant aim, but which
at shall conquer for all ages. Be peace amidst
the riving of the storm, and harmony in discord.
Be thou eternal beauty in the eternal war of life.
Be as a sister's tears to those who s6\row, the
veice of manhood to . those whose courage faints,
a home to the exile, hope to those who have losj
their hope. In the struggle with this hell of earth,
be ever, everywhere, the strength that against
death prevails with the stronger strength of love;
be thou the hell of love. *
"In word and in example give thyself freely
to thy brothers. Multiply thy one self by living
"deeds, and from thy one self a thousand shall
come forth. Be thou even in chains by toil
* The critics took exception to the expression "hell of love. "
Krasinski defended it, saying- he had taken it from the writings of
St. Teresa. Letters of Z- Krushiski to Stanislas Kozmian. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish).
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? 174
POLAND
unwearied. Let every pain, though it shall pain,
not pain thee. Be sanctity in bondage.
"What the world called dream and mirage,
y make living, make of them a faith, a law, a cer-
tainty, a truth, till the world, thy murderer,
shall kneel and own that God and country are as
the conscience of the nations. Thy thought shall
be the stream of light, God's judgment flashing
on the heights, above the throng of godless here
below. Nor men nor cannon shall keep it back,
nor falsehoodgsjfor deception, genius, praise, nor
kings, nor paHples. "
Thus tl di^ Anonymous Poet, who began his
career witb/an Undivine Comedy, ended it with
a Resurrecturis. r. He was surrounded all his days
by the tragedy of his nation, tormented within
and without by the intolerable bitterness of a life,
which to him, and to every Pole of his generation,
brought nothing but the spectacle of all that was
sacred and beloved trampled underfoot and
unavenged. Every incitement to despair, revenge,
negation of God and hatred of man, might well
have been his. Yet he pointed without faltering
to one great moral: to the triumph of hope, love,
arid pain over evilj. to salvation through purity
of aims and means. " In spite of all visible events,"
he wrote to his friend Gaszynski at a time when no
ray of light pierced the cloud of tribulation that
hung over Poland, and over his own life, " believe
? In a short (ketch of this nature, I have been obliged to
confine myself entirely to Krasinski's masterpieces, which are at
the same time those that chiefly show the development of his idea.
It is enough to say here' that those writings of his that I have had
to pass over carry out the same thoughts, an<j breathe th^ ? ame
devoted patriotism.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 175
me a better dawn is near, a second spring in
our lives, another youth. Poland will give us back,
will give us back what we have lost for her, joy,
enthusiasm, the heart's health. "* In each defeat
he bade his nation see but the promise of her
future victory. He believed against the cruellest
evidence of circumstance. Sferavit contra spent.
* Letters of Zygmunt KrusmsH, Vpl, I, To Constantine
Gaszynski, June I, 1843,
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? CHAPTER V
THE MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA
AMONG the greatest of Poland's poets
stands Julius Slowacki. Inferior to his
contemporaries, Mickiewicz and Krasinski,
in depth of thought or moral beauty, he is a
master of style and language. He began his poetical
life as a follower and warm admirer-oi,JB^ron. He
ended it--death took the brilliant, egotistic poet
in the flower of his years--as a? mystic.
"Place on his grave for all inscription: To the
author of Anhelli; and that will be enough to
secure his fame in future generations. " So wrote
Krasinski after Slowacki's death. * And Anhelli,
that strange mystical and poetic journey through
Siberia, stamped with the eternal despair of the
prison-house of the Pole, ranks with the most
striking and most tragic productions of the great
prophetic-national Polish literature.
"When I read it," said Krasinski--and it
should be remembered that one of Krasinski's
lifelong tortures was his terror of Siberia addedjp
his conviction that he would be banished there--
"I yearned, God help me! for Siberia. For many
nights, Siberia appeared to me in my dreams as
a melancholy Eden. "t "The stamp of his
* A. Malecki' Julius Slowacki. Lw6w, 1901 (Polish),
t Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. III. J,wsSw, 1887, To
Roman Zaluski, May 13th, 1840 (Polish),
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? MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 177
[Slowacki's] poetry," he goes on to say, "is
that marvellous mingling of horror and of
charm. "
The impression made by Anhelli on the reader's
mind is that of a desolation as unending as those
dreary snow-bound wastes that Slowacki unrolls
to our gaze; a despair which the pale light of the
vague mysticism that gleams through the work
seems but to enhance. The white deserts, their
sameness only broken by the figures of the doomed
Polish exiles; the fires of the Northern lights;
the strange brilliance of the Siberian winter stars,
are a fit setting for Anhelli, the youth who passes
through the prisons and the mines, as the type of
his people's sufferings, till his heart breaks with his
anguish.
It is not our intention to describe Slowacki's
Anhelli, but to let this exquisite prose-poem speak
for itself in extracts which can, unfortunately,
convey but a meagre impression of the beauty of
the Polish original. But we would first note one
or two of its characteristics. Inspired in part by
Slowacki's wanderings in the Holy Land, it is
written in a species of Biblical prose. It is in no
wise intended as STclosely "exact presentment of
Siberia. More than one of the episodes introduced
into it belong, not to Siberia, but to Poland.
Various of the Poles whom Anhelli meets in
Siberia never in reality went there. But Slowacki
chose to place the poem consecrated to the sorrows
of his nation, and into which he poured his own
sadness and weariness of life, in Siberia, that land
watered by the tears of thousands of Poles, which,
at the time that the poet was writing, stood before
N
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? 178
POLAND
Polish minds as the large factor with which they
were compelled to reckon. *
Although, from time to time, Anhelli touches
. upon the Messianistic theory of Poland's salvation
and exaltation, yet its general tone is that of a
I profound melancholy that borders on despair, of
'something, indeed, not far removed from pessi-
mism that, as we have seen, is unusual in ti^e Polish -
poetry of Slowacki's generation. We have called
Anhelli a mystical poem; but its mysticism is- of j
a peculiarly indeterminate and unsatisfying--de- .
scription. In fact, with a few exceptions here and
there, "the supernatural element in Anhelli strikes
the reader as being more of a fairy-like than,
strictly speaking, a spiritual nature. This feature
weakens the work as a great national expression;
but from the artistic standpoint it creates that
weird and unearthly atmosphere that for long''
haunts our vision, as though we had wandered
to some far distant and unutterably mournful
dream-land.
"The exiles came into the land of Siberia," (so
Anhelli begins). "And, clearing a wide place, they
built them a wooden house, that they might dwell
together in harmony and brotherly love. For
some time there was great order among them and
great sadness, because they could not forget that
they were exiles, and would see their country no
more, unless it pleased God. "
Here Slowacki has the Polish Emigration in
mind. f He describes how dissensions break out ,
in their midst. Then:
"They saw a great flock of blacky birds flying
* A. Malecki, op. cit. t A. Malecki, op cit.
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? MrSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 179
from the north. And beyond the birds there
appeared, as it were, a caravan, and a tribe of
people, and sledges drawn by dogs, and a herd of
reindeer with branching horns, and men on skates
carrying spears. And at their head went the king
of the tribe, who was also their priest, clad in
furs and in corals.
"Then that king, as he drew nigh to the crowd
of eMles, said to them in the language of their
own country: 'Welcome! Lo, I knew your
fathers, unhappy like you; and I beheld how
they lived in the fear of God and died, saying,
Oh, my country! my country ! '"
This king, the Shaman, the Siberian wizard-
priest, stays with the exiles to comfort them. He
is the Virgil of the poem, who leads Anhelli through
the journey where he is confronted, not so much
with individuals, as in the Divina Commedia, but
with the symbolizations of the national suffer-
ings. *
"Then the Shaman, gazing into the hearts of
that band of exiles, said within himself: 'Verily,
I have not found here what I sought. Their hearts
are weak, and they will be vanquished by sadness.
They would have been worthy men in the midst of
happiness, but misery will change them into evil
and dangerous men.
We know how the Polish Rising, projected in
the forties of the nineteenth century on democratic
lines, was pushed by Austrian machinations into a
different movement, and ended in the Galician'
massacres. Krasinski's piercingly clear political
acumen was never obscured by the mystic tend-
ency of his mind. He saw whither a class agitation
would be likely to lead a nation groaning as
was Poland under abnormal and intolerable con-
ditions. Before the disaster befell, trembling for
the moral danger that threatened his country,
Krasinski sent forth a passionate cry to those of
his fellow Poles, who were working a national'
rising as a social revolution, to stay before it was
too late. That warning is his Psalm oflLove. The
Psalm of Love is a plea to the human race, no less .
than to one people, to shun the works of bloodshed
and violence: the poet's attestation that one
only element can save a nation, namely, love.
"Carry your arms against hell. Slay the black
brood of demons. The guillotine and pillage are
the weapons of the human race in its infancy; rage,
the liberty, not of man, but of the beast. Now is
the time to take to oneself the toil of angels, the
time to cast off every stain, and by that very act
to conquer slavery. Destruction is not action.
There is but one truth, divine, fruitful in deed;
transfiguration through love. "
With his soul's whole strength, he pleads that the
Poland he loved to call holy, who he believed was
to prove to mankind that virtue and love are
stronger than brute force, must never, by stooping
to unworthiness and violence, lose her destined
vocation. .
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? 164
POLAND
"Who changeth sorrow into crime, who forgeth
fetters into knives, not into swords, cursed be he. "
"When geniuses have descended to this world,
they have led their cause by a different road. No
one of them was a dictator of the ages through
murder and the torture chamber. Rather, they
live in peril, in the end they die, but their victory
lasts for ever. Only the weak soul chooses butchery.
His name is Marius, his name is Robespierre. "
Then he bids such of his countrymen who
would sweep away the ancient nobility of Poland
to look upon what the latter have done for their
country. They have died for Poland in battle. They
have perished for her in Siberia. And who, asks
the poet, could we find who are faultless ? " Only
one, He only Who was man and God; and from
the sinner another man soars upward through
suffering, changed as the phoenix, and immortal. "
Search the world; the Alps, the waters of the
Mediterranean, the Spanish sierras, the snows of
Russia, the battlefields of France, where the
Polish nobles have sown "the seed of future
Poland, the god-like grain, their own blood;
and you are the children of that pain. " They
lead that nation which, far from thrusting men
down to the pit, is to uplift them as she mounts
ever higher. But near her stands the tempter.
Evil thoughts "grow where there are chains. "
Siberia and the knout are nothing to the poison
sown by slavery. "But the corrupted spirit of a
nation, that only is the pain of pains " ; conscience
warped by a mass of suffering, reason confused by
the' wandering of perverted pride, crime repre-
levied as virtue, children taught to look on murder
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 165
as a glorious deed, the sister bidding the brother
take up the assassin's dagger, the native country
turned into a hell.
"Oh, my holy one, abjure these delusions, the
phantoms of an evil moment. Thou wilt not rid
thee of thy ancient faith, that he only can cut
through his chains who is anointed with the sign
of virtue, that to be a Pole upon this earth is to
live nobly and to God. "
The Anonymous Poet reads hope from the
very afflictions that thronged around his nation
on every side.
"My Poland! Holy Poland! Thou standest
on the threshold of thy victory. This is the last
term of thy sorrows. Let it be only seen that thou
art the eternal foe of evil. Then shall the chains of
death be shattered, and thou wilt be assumed to
heaven, because even in death thou wast with
God. "
In the final moment when death struggles with
life, when dying lips sob out the last accents of
doubt and lamentation:
"In the strength of thy martyrdom overcome
that moment, conquer that pain; and thou shalt
rise again, thou shalt rise as the queen of the
Slavonian fields. "
Then the poet turns to the ideal of Messianistic
longings; the celestial vision of a spiritualized
country.
"Let them who love thee gaze on thy face as
on the spring. Be the mistress who straightens
the crooked things of the world, the leader of
universal love. Blot out all sin, dry all tears, rule
over the world of souls, spurn the government
>
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? i66
POLAND
of flesh. Unpolluted, carry the breath of the
Lord. "
But that spiritual conquest is not reached yet.
The powers of darkness are still close at hand.
"Fling away your murderous weapons," is the
reiteration that tolls all through the concluding
verses of the psalm. "Against hell carry your
arms. / Slay the black brood of demons. " And, when
the word of the Lord shall thunder forth, " then
forward in the name of God" to the holy rising,
from which " God will not turn away His face. "
So ends the poem which Count Tarnowski
places among the world's splendid failures of
patriotic pleading,* written to save a nation, and
written in vain.
The catastrophe, greater even than what Kras-
inski had foretold, came to pass in 1846. Krasinski
( beheld the country, whose purity and suffering
. he had promised would confer upon her the
heralding of a new spiritual epoch, dragged down
to shame. His anguish brought him to the jjoint
of death. From that time he was prematurely
aged. Rent by the distress of his soul under which
his bodily frame came near to sinking, in the
agony of those days when Galicia was soaked in
blood spilt by her own children, he could still,
he did still, cling to the conviction of his heart.
He could still tell the beloved friend to whom he
poured out his thoughts that the idea would
conquer. f He could still, apparently a dying man,
tear from his pain words of consolation for his
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
t Letters of Zygmunt Krmsinski. W >>\. I. To Constantine Gaszynski,
March 1st, 1846.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 167 /
people. And so he gave his nation her Psalmfof"
Grief. f
Slowacki, formerly Krasinski's friend, had, in a
poem of extraordinary artistic beauty, made~
mockery, not untouched by a personal gibe *at
the Anonymous Poet's private tragedy, of the
anti-revolutionary tendency of the Psalm of Love.
The Psalm of Grief is Krasinski's justification
against his brother-poet's attack. In grave and
dignified accents, with the generosity of one who(
Sassed over the bitterness of an individual wound,
Irasinski answers the poem that he himself
praised as an ornament to the Polish language.
Would, says he, that he had been the false prophet,
and that his challenger had been the true one\T
On the lines of the Psalm of Love, he refutes the
revolutionary tenets that he believed could only"
bring a nation to ruin. The spirit and the flesh
ever war, the idea against the brute beast, the
angel against the tiger. In the combat and con-
vulsion of the world, who shall redeem us? Who
shall bring harmony into a disordered chaos?
He Who knows neither the burden of the' body
nor the sickness of the soul: the Holy Ghost.
Beneath His rule blood will be shed no more. "In
the morning He waketh to hope the people
who slumber. " He shall make the very shadows
"as silver, till dawn becomes midday. "
Brotherly love will save those who are trembling
on the very brink of the abyss. Parted from each
other, they are damned. United, they are redeemed.
The radiance of the Holy Ghost conquers the
curse of centuries. The soul,ruled by Him, "shall
feel the love of toil and the courage of suffering. "
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? 168' / POLAND
She shall " lift men from the mire and hide their
shame. Unabased in the midst of vileness, loving
evef' in the midst of trials, her heart will become
as steel, and her eyes shall weep for every human
grief. " /Rhus through love and pain shall the soul
vwork her way to God. Even with the horror of
r what had recently befallen fresh upon him; when
v to keep hope alive, where every exterior event
incited to despair, meant a life and death struggle,
the^Anonymous Poet spoke a message of virility
i and life. He bade his people be the nation to rise
'-5* above moral stain, whose weapon shall not be the
i -' assassin's but Christ's, and who will' therefore
conquer in the power of Christ; whose triumph
'shall be commensurate with her anguish and' her
'. love. "Thus she riseth from the dead": are the
^ . last words of the Psalm of Grief. 'Ti '. ^
With the Psalm of Good WilU-tS^r-tr^-
- j ^ inski's Psalms of the Future close. I^hisj'^he noblest
^~ of Krasinski's poems, is-^e seal^f his life's ? work,
'the culmination of tfc^great prophetical poetry
"^of Poland. His own pain had taught Krasinski -his.
message to his nation. The Psalm of Good Will
breathes the sadness and majesty of a farewell to
his people, from one who had won to his haven
after suffering and struggle. In its long, sweeping
cadences the hymn reveals that the poet had
looked into the mysteries of grief only to rise
'victorious above them; that he had found in
-,Jcreath no^tirig^but resurrection^ His prayer is not
''~~for his fiaiion's glory, not for her material triumph,
but for thatiwhich will bring her both: for good
will. . 1
Now that Thy judgment has thundered in
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 169
heaven on the two thousand years that have past,
amidst that judgment, grant us, oh, Lord, that
by our holy deeds we may rise from death. " ,
This is the petition of which the poet cannot
weary, to which the stanzas of the Psalm modu-
late as into some grand closing chord.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst'
give, oh, Lord," sings the son of the unhappiest
of nations. With the eyes of mystical devotion,
he reads in her past a history of love. " Thou hast
given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord". ;
for, when thrust down from the land of the living
by dismen\berment, "Thou didst keep us who
were dead living in the field of war. We were not,
and we '*vere. . . . Thou hast given us all that
Thou oqulast give, oh, Lord; a pure life, there-
fore worthy of the cross, and the cross that brings
us to Thy stars; Earth Thou didst take from us>,
and send down heaven, and Thy heart shelters
us on every side. But our free will Thou hadst to
leave to us. Without ourselves, even Thou canst
not save us; for so hast Thou ennobled man and
every nation that Thy thought, suspended in
heaven, awaits the choice of man or nation for
their several roads. " " Thou hast*¥ us all that
Thou courdst give, oh, Lord "; tne example of
Jerusalem, " in whom Thy love for so long dwelt,"
and who is throneless and widowed -because she
desired revenge, and does not understand the
might of Christ's cross. "Thou hast given us all
that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord"; foj we have
seen how the works of death bring destruction,
not on those against whom they are directed,- but
on those who handle them. v
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? 170 POLAND
Here ends the tranquil and devout hymn of
praise. Behind Krasinski's promises, there is always
the reality of an exacting warfare. If Poland is to
be a. chosen nation, the harder must be her struggle
to justify her calling. The Psalm becomes a sup-
plication for victory in the battle.
"W. e are above the abyss, on the narrow
straits. Our wings are sprouting to the resurrec-
'don, our lips are parted for the cry of joy. From
the blue skies, as though from Thy bosom, golden
shafts of dawn, as though Thy sheltering arms, are
spreading from the heavens to us on earth below,
to take from our foreheads the load of agelong
sorrow. All is ready, and the east is all aflame, and
angels watching. "
But from the other side, heaving to our feet,
rises the darkness: "the pit, eternal death, where
Thou art not," where are all things evil. If we
turn^one backward glance towards it, one step to
meet it, then "the light of dawn will pale upon
our brows, Thy Son shall shed no tear for us, and
the Holy Spirit shall not console us. "
"Have mercy, Lord, defend us, be with us! "
We stand alone to face the final moment. None
may help us. Our destiny is in our own hands.
Then the name, with which "upon their lips
millions of Polish souls have gone to death," rises
in the poet's heart: the name of Mary. He sees
her, not with the rapture of his earlier vision in
Dawn, leading in triumph a host of warriors, but
as a suppliant, kneeling at the throne of her Son,
pleading for a suffering nation. He sees her above
the stars that turn to her in prayer, above suns
and the Milky Way, and behind her, weeping, are
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 'rj\
the souls of the Polish dead.
Below is the pit,
echoing with the mocking laughter of hell. Its
winds roar in our ears, the foam of its waves
blinds our eyes by which it would drag us down to s,
death. "Oh, vain one, it seeth not what /is being
wrought on high. Oh, vain one, it seeth not that
its rage is nought when such a heart for us is
wrung. " And the poet then pours out his last
prayer for his people:
"Oh, Lord, Lord, then not for hope--as a
flower is it strewn : then not for the destruction of
our foes--their destruction dawns on to-morrow's
clouds: not for the weapons of rule--from the
tempests they will fall to us: not for any help--
Thou hast opened already the field of events
before us: but amidst the terrible convulsion of
these events, we beseech Thee only for a pure will
within ourselves, oh, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
"Oh, Thou most dear, hidden but visible
beyond the veils of the transparent worlds, Thou
present everywhere, immortal, holy! Thou Who
commandedst the being of man that, poor in
strength, and little in his birth, he should to an
angel grow by might of sacrifice; and to our
Polish nation didst ordain that she should lead
the nations into love and peace ! We beseech Thee,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we, suspended
between Thy kingdom and the pit, we beseech
Thee with our foreheads sunk to earth, our temples
bathed in the breathing of Thy spring, surrounded
with the wheels of shattered times and perishing
governments, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! we
beseech Thee create in us a pure heart, make
new our thoughts within us, root out from our
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? 172
POLAND
souls tie tares of sacrilegious falsehood, and give
us the gift, ^eternal among Thy gifts--give us
good will! " v
One . only word more remained to Krasinski to
speak to his people, and then his work was done.
In the thick of the terrible events of 1846, when,
weighed down by physical weakness and mental
agony, he could scarcely set pen to paper, he had
struggled fcV&end his nation the message she
needed. '
'. ' ? )h, pray for me to God," he wrote to Delfina
Potocka, as his spirit wrestled against a mind and
body too wearied to obey its bidding. "I feel
nothing egotistic in that desire. For Poland"--
whom even in a private letter he, calls by a feigned
name--" is/ bent beneath all the winds. She
implores, she implores for counsel. "* Dis'satisfiedr*'
with what he wrote; JCrasifiski did- taot publish
the poem in question till 1851, when it came out
und,er the. title ^Resurx^ctup^l It stands forth as his'
supreme ^ctory ov. er^' pessimism <<id d<<apair.
WhaxA he. asks; is this world but"a "cemetery of
ft^s, of blood and mire? This world is eternal
Golgotha to each. The spirit writhes in vain
against its pain. There is no halting place in the--
tempest of this life. Fate mocks us every moment.
Death is close ; and only far away, somewhere on 1
a later wave of ages, resurrection.
"Then must we grow numb, be petrified, be
without heart, become as murderers among the
murderers, among the criminals be criminal our-
selves? Lie, hate, and slay, and mock. We will
* Works ofZysrmunt Krasinski. Jubilee Edition, Cracow, 1912.
Vol. VI. p. 369.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 173
give back to the world what it gives us. Let/us
eat and drink, caress the body and abase the mind.
So shall we be counted among the stupid and the /
happy.
"Oh, let it not be so ! My soul, draw back, oh,
stay! Not such a weapon for those who would
shorten evil. . Only one power in the world, the
quiet strength of sacrifice, conquers an oppressive
fate.
"Oh, know thyself for what thou art. Crave
not for the mastery which is His in heaven, nor
choose to be as the brute beast fattening on the
fields of. pasture. On this side the grave, before
. the resurrection dawns, be thou an. unbroken
masterpiece of will, be patience, mistress of mis-
fortune, that slowly buildeth up an edifice from
nought. Be that defeat, of distant aim, but which
at shall conquer for all ages. Be peace amidst
the riving of the storm, and harmony in discord.
Be thou eternal beauty in the eternal war of life.
Be as a sister's tears to those who s6\row, the
veice of manhood to . those whose courage faints,
a home to the exile, hope to those who have losj
their hope. In the struggle with this hell of earth,
be ever, everywhere, the strength that against
death prevails with the stronger strength of love;
be thou the hell of love. *
"In word and in example give thyself freely
to thy brothers. Multiply thy one self by living
"deeds, and from thy one self a thousand shall
come forth. Be thou even in chains by toil
* The critics took exception to the expression "hell of love. "
Krasinski defended it, saying- he had taken it from the writings of
St. Teresa. Letters of Z- Krushiski to Stanislas Kozmian. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish).
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? 174
POLAND
unwearied. Let every pain, though it shall pain,
not pain thee. Be sanctity in bondage.
"What the world called dream and mirage,
y make living, make of them a faith, a law, a cer-
tainty, a truth, till the world, thy murderer,
shall kneel and own that God and country are as
the conscience of the nations. Thy thought shall
be the stream of light, God's judgment flashing
on the heights, above the throng of godless here
below. Nor men nor cannon shall keep it back,
nor falsehoodgsjfor deception, genius, praise, nor
kings, nor paHples. "
Thus tl di^ Anonymous Poet, who began his
career witb/an Undivine Comedy, ended it with
a Resurrecturis. r. He was surrounded all his days
by the tragedy of his nation, tormented within
and without by the intolerable bitterness of a life,
which to him, and to every Pole of his generation,
brought nothing but the spectacle of all that was
sacred and beloved trampled underfoot and
unavenged. Every incitement to despair, revenge,
negation of God and hatred of man, might well
have been his. Yet he pointed without faltering
to one great moral: to the triumph of hope, love,
arid pain over evilj. to salvation through purity
of aims and means. " In spite of all visible events,"
he wrote to his friend Gaszynski at a time when no
ray of light pierced the cloud of tribulation that
hung over Poland, and over his own life, " believe
? In a short (ketch of this nature, I have been obliged to
confine myself entirely to Krasinski's masterpieces, which are at
the same time those that chiefly show the development of his idea.
It is enough to say here' that those writings of his that I have had
to pass over carry out the same thoughts, an<j breathe th^ ? ame
devoted patriotism.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 175
me a better dawn is near, a second spring in
our lives, another youth. Poland will give us back,
will give us back what we have lost for her, joy,
enthusiasm, the heart's health. "* In each defeat
he bade his nation see but the promise of her
future victory. He believed against the cruellest
evidence of circumstance. Sferavit contra spent.
* Letters of Zygmunt KrusmsH, Vpl, I, To Constantine
Gaszynski, June I, 1843,
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? CHAPTER V
THE MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA
AMONG the greatest of Poland's poets
stands Julius Slowacki. Inferior to his
contemporaries, Mickiewicz and Krasinski,
in depth of thought or moral beauty, he is a
master of style and language. He began his poetical
life as a follower and warm admirer-oi,JB^ron. He
ended it--death took the brilliant, egotistic poet
in the flower of his years--as a? mystic.
"Place on his grave for all inscription: To the
author of Anhelli; and that will be enough to
secure his fame in future generations. " So wrote
Krasinski after Slowacki's death. * And Anhelli,
that strange mystical and poetic journey through
Siberia, stamped with the eternal despair of the
prison-house of the Pole, ranks with the most
striking and most tragic productions of the great
prophetic-national Polish literature.
"When I read it," said Krasinski--and it
should be remembered that one of Krasinski's
lifelong tortures was his terror of Siberia addedjp
his conviction that he would be banished there--
"I yearned, God help me! for Siberia. For many
nights, Siberia appeared to me in my dreams as
a melancholy Eden. "t "The stamp of his
* A. Malecki' Julius Slowacki. Lw6w, 1901 (Polish),
t Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. III. J,wsSw, 1887, To
Roman Zaluski, May 13th, 1840 (Polish),
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? MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 177
[Slowacki's] poetry," he goes on to say, "is
that marvellous mingling of horror and of
charm. "
The impression made by Anhelli on the reader's
mind is that of a desolation as unending as those
dreary snow-bound wastes that Slowacki unrolls
to our gaze; a despair which the pale light of the
vague mysticism that gleams through the work
seems but to enhance. The white deserts, their
sameness only broken by the figures of the doomed
Polish exiles; the fires of the Northern lights;
the strange brilliance of the Siberian winter stars,
are a fit setting for Anhelli, the youth who passes
through the prisons and the mines, as the type of
his people's sufferings, till his heart breaks with his
anguish.
It is not our intention to describe Slowacki's
Anhelli, but to let this exquisite prose-poem speak
for itself in extracts which can, unfortunately,
convey but a meagre impression of the beauty of
the Polish original. But we would first note one
or two of its characteristics. Inspired in part by
Slowacki's wanderings in the Holy Land, it is
written in a species of Biblical prose. It is in no
wise intended as STclosely "exact presentment of
Siberia. More than one of the episodes introduced
into it belong, not to Siberia, but to Poland.
Various of the Poles whom Anhelli meets in
Siberia never in reality went there. But Slowacki
chose to place the poem consecrated to the sorrows
of his nation, and into which he poured his own
sadness and weariness of life, in Siberia, that land
watered by the tears of thousands of Poles, which,
at the time that the poet was writing, stood before
N
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? 178
POLAND
Polish minds as the large factor with which they
were compelled to reckon. *
Although, from time to time, Anhelli touches
. upon the Messianistic theory of Poland's salvation
and exaltation, yet its general tone is that of a
I profound melancholy that borders on despair, of
'something, indeed, not far removed from pessi-
mism that, as we have seen, is unusual in ti^e Polish -
poetry of Slowacki's generation. We have called
Anhelli a mystical poem; but its mysticism is- of j
a peculiarly indeterminate and unsatisfying--de- .
scription. In fact, with a few exceptions here and
there, "the supernatural element in Anhelli strikes
the reader as being more of a fairy-like than,
strictly speaking, a spiritual nature. This feature
weakens the work as a great national expression;
but from the artistic standpoint it creates that
weird and unearthly atmosphere that for long''
haunts our vision, as though we had wandered
to some far distant and unutterably mournful
dream-land.
"The exiles came into the land of Siberia," (so
Anhelli begins). "And, clearing a wide place, they
built them a wooden house, that they might dwell
together in harmony and brotherly love. For
some time there was great order among them and
great sadness, because they could not forget that
they were exiles, and would see their country no
more, unless it pleased God. "
Here Slowacki has the Polish Emigration in
mind. f He describes how dissensions break out ,
in their midst. Then:
"They saw a great flock of blacky birds flying
* A. Malecki, op. cit. t A. Malecki, op cit.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? MrSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 179
from the north. And beyond the birds there
appeared, as it were, a caravan, and a tribe of
people, and sledges drawn by dogs, and a herd of
reindeer with branching horns, and men on skates
carrying spears. And at their head went the king
of the tribe, who was also their priest, clad in
furs and in corals.
"Then that king, as he drew nigh to the crowd
of eMles, said to them in the language of their
own country: 'Welcome! Lo, I knew your
fathers, unhappy like you; and I beheld how
they lived in the fear of God and died, saying,
Oh, my country! my country ! '"
This king, the Shaman, the Siberian wizard-
priest, stays with the exiles to comfort them. He
is the Virgil of the poem, who leads Anhelli through
the journey where he is confronted, not so much
with individuals, as in the Divina Commedia, but
with the symbolizations of the national suffer-
ings. *
"Then the Shaman, gazing into the hearts of
that band of exiles, said within himself: 'Verily,
I have not found here what I sought. Their hearts
are weak, and they will be vanquished by sadness.
They would have been worthy men in the midst of
happiness, but misery will change them into evil
and dangerous men.
