No More Learning

In one
he complains that the Creator had denied him the power
of expression, and that he felt in his heart heavenly
accords which were shattered before they could reach
his lips. {God has refused me. June, 1836. ) Far inferior
to the love lyrics he was to write later to another, these
early poems express sorrow and remorse, not love.
Krasinski was eating Dead sea apples. He realized with
an anguish of regret that the powers of his mind, the
brilliant gifts of his youth, had been squandered in
a love which was from the outset doomed to ruin.
"My heart is broken" is the burden of a poem he
sent to Gaszynski, of which we quote some extracts
because, to comprehend the fulness of Krasinski's
spiritual uprising, we must first go down with him into
the abyss of his despair.
All that I loved is far away as God, or fadeth as a cloud.
What has the spark of genius wrought for me? It only
glimmered in the deep places of my soul. Had I not loved
a mortal beauty or laid my lips upon an earthly brow, I might
have lit a flame upon the vale of earth with that spark which
fell to me from eternity. Too late to-day! The soul is even
as the body. Once it is marred, and the marred part thou
tearest not away with all thy strength from the whole members,
the evil overrunneth all and multiplies. Happy the body, it
alone can die.
Ever between two waves the spirit rocks. Her thought in
heaven dwells, her heart sinks ever lower into hell. Immortal
war she wages with herself, she may not die, and at each
moment dies in double woe. All is unbearable; for guilt and
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sentence in each spark of life commingle. Ah! life seems but
a mockery only. Unbroken sleep, peace of the grave, are false,
even as happiness is falsehood. Even as the world is great, it
is the fallen field. Even as the world is great, it is the rock of
shipwreck. With endless toil, with everlasting pain, so all is
wrought, so all is ended. {My heart is broken. November, 1837. )
These lines are the only acknowledgment we have
from Krasinski's pen of his own genius. Not long after
he had written it he tells Reeve, in the last letter but
one that ever passed between them, that his position
with his father and Mme Bobrowa had become in-
tolerable. He met the latter in Kissingen during the
summer. Their interviews took place in a cemetery, as
the only place safe from observation where they stood
among the tombs, rain beating on them unheeded.
"In one word," says Krasinski to Reeve, "she was a woman
who had reached the last stage of exaltation, who had thrown
off the conventions of the world, considering with a calm eye
that society would soon reject her and seeing in this world no
one except him who ought never to have brought her to so
terrible an extremity. Then there came into his head a thought
of despair and love. He resolved to sacrifice himself for her.
He wrote to his father that he wished to drive her to divorce
her husband, and he would marry his beloved. Then began
an atrocious tragedy. The father no longer answered him, he
would only write to his friend [Danielewicz]. He threatened
his son with his curse. He accused him of driving him into his
grave, and declared that this marriage should never take place
without entering into war with him, without being separated
from him for ever, and neither ever seeing each other again.
What could the son do against such terrible threats? 1"
Krasinski was gradually brought to the point of
acknowledging that he must break for ever with Mme
Bobrowa. He refused to do it in the drastic manner
enjoined by his father. He would only consent to take
the step in some natural, inevitable way that would
spare her feelings.
1 Correspondance. Letter to Reeve. Vienna, Dec. 29, 1837.
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? 176 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I loved that woman," he wrote to the General. "That
woman has been good to me. I will maintain in regard to her
all the forms of friendship, all the precautions of affection:
but I will not wound either her pride or her heart1. "
The time allowed to Krasinski by the Russian pass-
ports had now expired, and in the summer of 1838 he
was obliged to return to Poland. What that return meant
to him he had already told Sottan two years earlier.
If we return coram in patriam, I confess it will be for me
a plunge into complete darkness, a descent to hell. . . On that
frontier where our ancestors once drew with happy emotions
their native air into their lungs, where they knelt to thank God
for having granted them to return from distant wanderings,
to-day we, when we stand there, must say farewell to the
feelings and persons dearest to us. To-day a foreign land is
our home. Our own has become worse than foreign, worse than
far away, because it is a prison. In that land of ours, except
for my father, I have no friend, scarcely anyone known to me2.
His friends were all in exile.
"My Konstanty,mayGod guard you,"he wrote to Gaszynski
on the day when he began the journey which he always believed
would end in Siberia. "Remember you are in a foreign country
among foreigners, and it is your most sacred duty to main-
tain the purity of the Polish name. In the nightmare of which
life is woven remember always that you have a friend who, far
off or near, will always remain the same to you3. "
On his way through Germany to Poland Krasinski
met for the last time as her lover Joanna Bobrowa. He
wrote to Sottan:
Oh, Adam, unhappy is he who with the naivety of a child,
dreaming of noble deeds, did violence to another's rights, tore
a wife from her husband, a mother from her children. I did
this, thinking in my madness that there were poetry and spring
on that road. Now, now I am deeply abased before myself, and
she before the world4.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Letters to Sotfan. Kissingen, July 10, 1836.
3 Letters to Gaszynski. Vienna, May 14, 1838.
4 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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? The Deviation
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Perhaps the most tragic feature of Krasinski's re-
lations with, his father is the deep mutual love that
survived the father's utter want of comprehension of his
son. Together with the expression of an unusually close
affection that we find in those letters from Zygmunt to
his father to which we have access in Dr Kallenbach's
pages, there is again and again the evidence of the son's
wounded feeling: his guarded defence of himself against
the General's reproach for not returning to the home
that the father's own conduct had rendered intolerable
to his son: his protests against his father's false con-
ception of his character. During the years of Zygmunt's
attachment to Mme Bobrowa Wincenty Krasinski had
occasionally crossed the frontier to spend a few weeks
with his son. These meetings had brought small joy to
either. They were passed in a battle between the father
whose one desire was to see his heir make a brilliant
marriage, and the son who loathed the thought of mar-
riage in itself, and who compassionated Mme Bobrowa
too much to consent to place the barrier of marriage
with another woman between himself and her.
"You cannot imagine," wrote he to Sottan after he
had joined his father in Poland in the summer of 1838,
"what my daily life at home is: how I feel that I am
killing my father and that I am being killed in my
turn1.
The summer which the two spent together at
Opinog6ra was one painful struggle between the father
and son. At last the father wrung from Zygmunt his
promise to see and write to Mme Bobrowa no more.
Wincenty Krasinski went to her in person and brought
back her written farewell to the man to whose memory
1 Letters to Soltan. Danzig, Aug. 12, 1838.
G.
12
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? 178 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
she remained faithful all her life. Tortured by the
thought of her grief, Krasinski in repeated letters begged
the friend who had originally made him acquainted with
the lady to watch over her, and to help her in any and
every way he could. From this closed chapter of his
life he carried a bitter searing of soul. At this time he
was corresponding constantly with the young Pole for
whom he wrote The Temptation, and who afterwards
became his brother-in-law by marrying into the Branicki
family: Adam Potocki. Krasinski was now only twenty-
six: but these letters warning a boy of sixteen who had
not yet bartered innocence for passion to shun the same
road that the poet had himself trodden, to strengthen
and beautify his character while it was still as clay for
the moulding, throw strong light on the tragic swiftness
with which Krasinski had laid down his youth:--and
as strong a light on the nobility, the undestroyable
idealism that were the possessions from which Krasinski
never parted. His experience had led him to that mile-
stone where he saw the only beauty of life in stern moral
obligation, life's greatest danger in the indulgence of
dreams beyond the sphere of action. Innocence is the
beautiful gift of Adam's age, but:
You at this moment are not yet standing in the vestibule,
you are still rocked on wings. But remember, so that you shall
not despair when those wings fall from you, that you must end
the journey on foot which you began so lightly, so charmingly,
so sweetly--I repeat on foot--and on their knees even must
each approach the sanctuary of life where the sacrifice is
celebrated, where for the eternal instruction of mankind God
clothed in our very flesh suffers and dies on a cross. This is
the difference between innocence and virtue. Virtue knows all,
understands all, has experienced all, has passed even through
hell, and has risen on the third day. In virtue there is the same
purity as in innocence, and, besides, the knowledge of all, of
good and evil. Your future is that virtue. So know this before
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the time, so that virtue shall not reveal itself to you in
intolerable burdens1.
To save this boy on the brink of a precipice
Krasinski told him what he would tell no one else.
None can adequately picture to himself how fearfully my
soul has been ruined by love, how I deprived myself of the
powers inexorably necessary for life, if we call labour, strength
and virtue life. For your instruction, for your good, I will tell
the frank truth which I should confess to no other. I became
stupefied, I became degraded, as the result of exaltations and
continual emotions of the soul. You would have the right to
be angry with a man who could not understand you and who
himself had never suffered as you are now suffering. My heart
is perhaps torn more deeply than yours, my soul yearning with
a greater despair, but I have behind me the series of the years
of my past youth, I know what seeds existed within me ready
to be developed, to give out their later fruit, and I can perfectly
appreciate why perhaps nothing will come forth from me any
more--I know what has killed me, and when it was that I killed
myself with all my flaming heart in that suicide2.
In November Krasinski left Poland and travelled
with his father through Italy. His faith in Poland
wavered together with his religious faith, both of which
were always inseparable in Krasinski's heart. He was
at the cross roads, perturbed, restless, unhappy, swept
from his spiritual bearings, still seeking endlessly where-
soever he discerned a glimmer of light. When he
mentions his nation in his correspondence it is generally
in a widely different key from that of his early letters to
Reeve, his later letters to his Polish friends. There is
a tone of profound discouragement. No hint is given of
the calling of a chosen country that remains to succeed-
ing generations as the trumpet call of the Anonymous
Poet to his people. At moments he could see nothing
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Adam Potocki. Opinog6ra, Oct.
5, 1838. Biblioteka Warszawska, May, 1905 (Polish).
2 Ibid. Warsaw, Oct. 20, 1838.
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? 180 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
but the faults of his nation: utter blankness and desola-
tion for her future. Death in these days seemed to him
the only outlet for the Pole from miserable existence.
"Who cannot struggle against the stream," he once said,
"and who will not degrade himself with the slime of its turbid
waters ought to leave the scene. To live in order to eat and
drink of shame, to grow fat on shame. . . is not worth while1. "
The moral stress that sapped at the roots of his life
reacted upon the artistic worth of Krasinski's work, no
less than upon the evolution of his national theory.
A Summer Night and The Temptation, both written in
1837, but published a few years later, fall far short of
Iridion or The Undivine Comedy. Indeed A Summer
Night seems a distinct return to the immaturity, we
might even say the tediousness, of Agay Han. It
appears at first reading a not very intelligible Byronic
sketch in poetic prose of a girl, forced by her father to
marry a prince of an alien race. Her lover watches the
ceremony in the church; makes his way into the newly
wedded wife's apartment and, with all the accompani-
ments of a romanticism, banal to the present day reader,
but affected by the contemporaries of Krasinski's youth,
he slays his beloved and himself, while the aged father
dies for grief at having sacrificed his daughter's happi-
ness.
This is the literal aspect of A Summer Night: but
there is something deeper behind it. In whatever
straits of pain Krasinski was immersed, his thoughts
and fears could not leave his nation. The vagueness
and confusion of the style of A Summer Night, the
scenic effects that bewilder the reader and go far to blot
out the main point, are in part attributable to the in-
1 Letters to Saltan. Prague, Aug. 5, 1836.
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fluence of Jean Paul: but still more are they Krasinski's
shield of defence by which he protected both his father
and himself from discovery. With the increasing severity
of the Russian censors, Krasinski was driven to redouble
his precautions. Sottan was bidden to look for the
manuscript of Iridion among Krasinski's papers in
Rome and to destroy it: and so no autograph of the
play exists. Gaszynski, if he mentions Iridion in his
letters to Krasinski, must write merely a capital I. To
his father, probably warned by the latter to do so, the
poet wrote, denying the absurd rumour that he was the
author of Iridion \ A Summer Night is the history of
the marriage of a Polish girl, a lady of the Radziwift
family and a cousin of Krasinski's own, with a Russian
prince.
When a boy of sixteen in 1828 Krasinski had
been present at this wedding: and even before the
events of 1830 had placed a great chasm between the
Pole and Russian, such an alliance, entailing, moreover,
the passing into Russian hands of the heiress's immense
estates, was one that every patriotic Pole would regard
with abhorrence. Under the squandering of decorative
devices, we had almost said upholstery, the hand of
the author of A Summer Nightvizjs, trembling, not only
with indignation against the ambitious parents who
compelled their daughters to such a lot, but with pro-
found compassion for the victims.
"She": "The Father," or "The Old Man": "The
Bridegroom," or "The Youth": "He," meaning the
lover: are the designations of the chief movers in the
drama. They are shades, not men and women of
flesh and blood; symbols who, as often is the case with
Krasinski, represent ideas.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 182 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I saw her," the prose-poem begins abruptly, "when they
led her in. She walked in terror in white robes with a wreath
on her head. "
Reading between the lines, and grasping those few
clues that penetrate through the mystery in which Kra-
sinski purposely shrouded them, there appears little doubt
that his thoughts were painfully reverting to another,
if not wholly dissimilar, story than that of a Polish girl,
sacrificed to her father's self-seeking: to the tragedy of
his own life.
"I grew beneath the shadow of his hand," cries the lover.
"It was he who first taught my lips the name of my country,
he who first made me know the desire for war. "
What other language is this than that of Krasinski's
reminiscences of his childhood with his father? When
the bride justifies to her lover the marriage she had
made, we might be reading one of those confidences to
Henry Reeve during the terrible struggle that Krasinski
underwent in the year of the Rising.
"Ah, my father came and entreated and implored. Thou
knowest how he can command with a harsh voice: but for
me he summoned not his orders from the bosom of a judge.
He veiled the thunder of his curse with tears, and sighed and
complained of his only child that she would thrust him down
into his grave. "
The autobiographical allusions, or rather hints, in
Krasinski's writings are too valuable to pass over in
silence. Another personal thread that runs through this
allegory refers to his separation from Joanna Bobrowa,
typified by the marriage which divides the lover from the
bride of the Russian prince. Twice does Krasinski, as
Dr Kleiner notices, emphatically repeat: "What the
priest shall bind, man will not unloose1. " There are
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
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other expressions that are clearly explainable by this
unfortunate love affair. And a touch purely personal,
and yet impregnated with the patriotism that is never
far to seek in what Krasinski wrote, is to be found in
the lover. The youth is a soldier, leading his followers
to some great battle--which is of course, in the hidden
language that Krasinski was forced to use, war for
Poland. With the warlike tradition of his house in his
veins, Krasinski had a craving for the battlefield from
which his physical weakness alone was enough to de-
bar him; the heroes of his works are always soldiers.
In addition, his regret at not having fought for his
country when she rose in 1830 was an ever living one.
"He fought at Ostrotenka1": are the words by which
he would have Stowacki understand the depths of his
grief when he saw his dearest friend Danielewicz die2.
Further, it is worthy of notice that Krasinski places
the lover, as he gives his farewell charge to his men
before he himself seeks the bride in the castle, among
those "three gentle slopes" which had been the poet's
country home. He alludes proudly to the inheritance
of freedom which was the possession of all who gathered
on that soil, till the "southern king" came, bringing
bondage with him. The youth promises his people
deliverance, but only after long labour on their part.
They must "beware of the tempters "; and this is Kra-
sinski's guarded message to the Polish emigration, for
even now, when the Anonymous Poet was not at his
moral best, desire for his nation's highest good never
ceased to devour his soul. "Lift your eyes. Space
1 One of the famous battles of the Rising.
2 Letters of' Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. 111. Lw6w, 1887. To Stowacki,
Munich, March 26, 1842 (Polish).
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? 184 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
enough for your souls hath remained in that blue
sky. "
The Temptation, although it also is a far cry from
the great dramas that went before it and the lyrics that
were to follow, is more interesting and more poetical
than A Summer Night. It too shows the influence of
Jean Paul and has also a suggestion of Scriptural style.
Krasinski wrote it for the young Adam Potocki, who
was bound to Petersburg, as a warning from his own
experience against the temptations that awaited the
Pole at the Russian court. The point of the work
was too dangerous to be told openly. It is therefore
clothed in another confused allegory, and covered with
the same mannerisms as those of A Summer Night.
Whatever their faults, both these works are the stifled
cry of a Polish heart. They are the words of one striving
to make his voice heard to those who could understand
what lay behind half uttered hints, scarcely articulate
murmurs. Yet even so the moral of The Temptation
was too obvious: and hundreds of young Poles went
to a Russian prison for having disseminated the poem.
"Mother slain six times," begins the poet in a transport
of love and grief. "Unhappy mother, with but one of thy
meads of green, with but one of thy fields of wheat, thou
bindest memory, and henceforth thy sons must suffer, wander,
love thee. "
Krasinski then recounts, as a vision, a day in the
life of a Polish youth whose nationality is of course only
indicated. He is mounting a fiery horse: one foot on
the stirrup, the other still on "the sweet grass of his
home," he is about to set out for the court of the "lord
of life and death," otherwise Nicholas I. His old mentor,
who will appear at his side from time to time, prays
that he may serve "only the Mother slain six times,"
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and that he may be spared not pain, for all must
suffer, but "the blush of shame and the ignominy of
weakness. "
For the descriptions in his poem Krasinski drew freely
on his memories of Petersburg. The Temptation is the
only record that he has left of his sufferings during those
long sad months in the Russian capital. Under an over
elaboration of style and hyperbolical detail the founda-
tion of the work is truth, and a truth known from a
harrowing personal experience. We may regret that
Krasinski overlaid his recollections with a fanciful
colouring instead of telling them with a directness that
would have added tenfold to their power: but he could
do nothing different. This tragic figure in Polish litera-
ture must hide his heart's agony under flowers and
fantastic shapes.
"They spoke there in the palace"--Krasinski had done
the same--" with a stifled voice, as if they feared the ear of
their enemies behind the walls. The old man took the youth
by the hand, and led him to the window. Hence could be seen
all the city, and the crowds that swarmed past. Mighty city,
strangely uniform and white ":
wrote Krasinski, remembering the snow-shrouded town
at which he had gazed during the tedious winter.
As the youth, disregarding the warning of the older
man, looks admiringly at the women who pass by:
amidst the sombrely clad people, men began to ride, before
whom the people bowed low. A long thin weapon was at their
sides. Great plumes were on their heads. Crying out with a
rough voice they went by in their might, and struck the children
who had remained in the road. . . till one on horseback rode up,
and all fell with their faces to the earth. That one was the lord
of life and death.
The adulation with which the Russian Tsars were
surrounded, especially during the reign of Nicholas I,
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? 186 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
was an attitude so foreign to the nature of the high-
spirited and freedom-loving Poles, who called their
fellow-citizens brothers and who were the equals of their
kings, that it could not fail to arouse a Pole's biting
sarcasm. Whenever Krasinski introduces the Tsar, his
contempt of the Asiatic servility of the Russian court
that he had seen with his own eyes finds free vent.
And again the boy gazes, fascinated, heedless of the
words of his companion:
and only when the latter repeated them a second time did he
cover his eyes with his hand and utter the name of his murdered
Mother, as a remembrance of his childhood.
"Now alone, he is alone in the great city ": and
here enters Krasinski's recollection of another boy,
weighed down with the grief he could not tell among
his country's enemies.
He concealed his unheard-of suffering under the aspect of
a tranquil face. On all sides is danger, on all sides torture.
There is none in whom he can confide. He must lie even to
women and children. He learns lying as a masterpiece of art,
and he became the master of artificial looks and of his tears
and of his movements till the light, like the rays of day,
vanished from his eyes. Oh! God, and his very garments
became a lie. He threw off his old garments in which he had
galloped over the steppes. He placed upon his head the plumes
and girded the thin weapon to his side. The crowd began to
make way before him, and his own horse knew him not.
Then in his vision the poet sees him enter a church,
once more with the old man. The latter:
looked on his friend with a gaze filled with grief. The youth
at first could utter no word, for he had forgotten how to show
the depths of his soul with words. Once only he cried aloud.
In that cry rang all the truth: the slow destruction of a soul
that did not wish to fall.
"Follow me! " says the other, "so that thou
mayest recall thy Mother's face. " He is led past
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? The Deviation
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cemetery after cemetery till to the echo of national song,
with banners fluttering and swords flashing under the
stars, and mournful voices of spirits above them--a
sort of setting in which Krasinski delights--they reach
the spot where she who was "slain six times" lies on
her bier: and the youth falls on his face weeping, and
curses life.
This symbolism of Poland's grave and her resur-
rection will remain with Krasinski to the end. Though
he was far as yet from the clear formulation of his great
national mysticism, its germs are here. The spirits
complain that God has betrayed them; "because our
holy one is dead. " The youth's guide bids them
"blaspheme not, for your holy one still breathes. She
shall rise again. " To Krasinski, and to every one of the
great patriot-prophets of Poland, the doubt of their
country's resurrection was in truth a blasphemy, because
it left the action of heaven unjustified, and the destruc-
tion of Poland an unredeemed crime.
Krasinski then brings the youth to the crisis, into
the gay and splendid show of the imperial court. In
the midst of the crowd of servitors, the play of the
women's silks of every hue, the violins and incense, he
is led to the feet of "the lord of life and death. " And
that audience, where the Tsar seeks to load the young
Pole with his favours, in Krasinski's case in vain, is,
allowing for its poetical and purposely disguised phras-
ing, the actual incident in Krasinski's life when he stood
before Nicholas I.
The lord of the castle descended from his throne, and walked
slowly, like a god, amidst the people falling to the ground.
He went straight to the seat of the youth. . . marvellously hand-
some and strong. The youth rose, and boldly looked in his
eyes. The lord of life and death spoke with beguiling tones:
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 188 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"Come, we will go together, and I will show thee the wonders
of my castle. " And when the youth arose, as one riveted, he
dropped a kiss on his brow.
With the bier of his Mother floating before his eyes, the
youth went, and his hand shook with the throbbing of his
boiling blood on the hard arm of the sovereign, who spoke
with his stern voice sounding as thunder to those making way
before him, but to his companion strangely sweetly and nobly.
He reminded him of the past. He even pronounced the name
of the slain Mother without trembling, as though her death
weighed not upon his conscience. He appeared not to doubt
for a moment that she had now perished from the earth for
ever, and he showed the youth another future, great, engraved
in the books of destiny. He lured his young desires towards
it. He spared not his promises. . . From his comely face, like
the face of Antichrist, the unhappy youth turned his eyes to
the earth. Each word of the tempter fell upon his heart like
a drop of poison.
He is led through the imperial treasuries: and the
thought of Krasinski turns to the riches bought for the
Russian crown by the blood and sweat of his fellow-
countrymen, toiling in the mines.
And to the youth it appeared that he stood on the brink
of mines, stretching out without end. . . He heard the hissing of
subterranean fires. . . Sometimes too there rang as though a cry
of the dying, as though a rattle of chains from the pit: and
human figures crept through those streams of light, like black
spots on the moon. The figures lifted their hands and, dragging
their chains, cried long for one drop of water, for one moment
of rest. . . It seemed to the youth that he had seen certain of their
faces somewhere of old on the surface of the earth: but the
lightnings veiled their faces, the roar of the melting metals
stifled their wails.
Then the beautiful women of the conqueror's race
surround him, tempting him by their charms.
For two long hours of that night I saw how, entangled,
bewildered, struggling, he ever and anon besought the heavenly
Father for strength and virtue, then again in despair rushed
through the festal halls and sought a weapon to drive into his
breast: but found it nowhere.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? The Deviation
Gradually he yields. He consents to betroth himself
to a "maiden of the alien race. " He sits by her side at
the banquet. Only when he sees through the glitter of
the feast the urn containing the ashes of his "slain
Mother" all grows dark before him, and his hand,
holding the goblet, trembles.
Ever more terribly wrestled his wandering soul, struggling
to return to its old faiths and hopes: but all that surrounded
him darkened his understanding with a heavy veil.