No More Learning

Each note from the strings unwinding
Shakes the air in fiery flaming.
Above the waves the song is burning.
To the ghosts it runs, it driveth,
Flaming ever and ever ringing.
In the original this passage is written in short
nervous lines, imitating the voice of the harp, and
quivering with the beautiful shades of harmonies and
echoes to which the Polish language, with its peculiarly
rich onomatopoeia, lends itself in a manner that is im-
possible to reproduce in English. I have only been
able to attempt to render its sense, not its sounds.
It is interesting to notice the connection here of
light and music of which we have heard much in
these latter days. We meet it also in Mickiewicz's
Improvization in the Third Part of The Ancestors1.
He, we know, took it from Saint-Martin.
"To the flashing of those sounds" the phantoms
advance across the waves.
1 Poland hath not perished was the war-song of the Polish legions
fighting under Napoleon, and has ever since remained one of the most
beloved and soul-stirring of Polish national songs.
2 See my translation in Adam Mickiewicz, the National Poet of Poland.
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? 240 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
There the horsetails, there the standards,
Fluttering snow white plumes and crowns1,
There the Catholic cross uplifted,
Shields and coats of arms and ensigns,
And a host of swords and helms.
Seest thou that face angelic?
As a star upon the darkness
On high, on high, she floats, she rises,
Wanes, and glimmers, quivers, flames.
Lo! her veil of blue and crimson
Shines about her as a rainbow.
Set with pearls and set with flowers
Flashes forth her crown of diamonds.
Welcome, welcome! She, the Queen,
Long a widow of her people,
To-day returneth to her kingdom
Which in Polish Czenstochowa
Erst our fathers gave to her,
And those fathers o'er these billows
Lo, she leadeth2.
Play no longer.
To the waves of such a rainbow
Harp of ours can sound no more,
Cannot lure the spirits here.
'Tis God's light that now has touched them.
Gold the lake around them shimmers,
Flasheth dawn upon their helmets.
In war array of ancient Poland,
Now all golden, all divine,
Sweep they into far off spaces,
As again to battle hastening.
With drawn swords and eyes upraised to their star-
crowned queen they follow her into unknown regions.
1 The horsetails were the insignia in ancient Poland of the Grand
Hetman. The Polish hussars wore white plumes attached to their shoulders
that were an efficacious means of terrifying the enemy's horse in a charge.
2 After Czenstochowa in 1655 had been the scene of an almost miracu-
lous repulse of the Swedish invaders of Poland John Casimir solemnly
placed Poland under the protection of the Blessed Virgin, proclaiming
her as Queen of Poland, which title the Poles retain in their prayers and
hymns to the present hour. The imagery of Krasinski's vision is taken
from the ancient painting of the Madonna at Czenstochowa, whither for
centuries Polish pilgrims have resorted.
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? Dawn
241
In ecstasy the poet cries aloud that she who once crushed
the serpent's head is descending to vanquish him for
the second time, as the herald of the new day when
the reign of justice shall begin in the world, and the
Polish nation conquer. His hymn is now turned to the
heavenly Queen of Poland.
Lo! the hour of mercy striketh!
With thee, by thee, the eternal
Thought that liveth in the heavens
Now begins to live on earth.
Float thou, float thou, God's own lily,
Over lan,ds and over oceans,
Over caverns deep of hell.
The old enemy shall cower at her feet, and her
Polish soldiers transfix him with their swords.
Then, oh, then and for all ages
God shall wipe away our tears.
The celestial army hastens ever further over the
water, to the east, the dawn. The snows redden in the
rays of morning. The spirits are seen no more. "They
have gone with the light--and with hope. "
The night has passed, but from its shadows
Faith remaineth in our bosoms,
And that faith fate cannot alter;
Ours, oh, ours is all the future.
Therefore: "all is mine and all is fair," cries he
whose hope was drawn only from inward vision, when
every outward circumstance pointed against its fulfil-
ment.
Mine the earth, the plains of heaven.
With the voice of life shall I
Make these rocks to ring again;
For God's word is in my heart.
Miracles are here and marvels.
Lo, my Poland--Poland shall be!
g. 16
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? 242 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
And he breaks into a song of thanksgiving, praising
"God, the spirits, man and thee," praising the living
and the dead, praising the universal world.
The third and culminating vision follows. Thought
I has left earth and is where the poet knows not nor can
( repeat: neither below nor on high, neither in the waters
! nor in the clouds, but in some depthless space, in the
translucence of eternal light, in an ocean beyond time.
There the exiles behold their Poland in the triumph
which she has won by her suffering. Krasinski never
goes further in the mystic exaltation of his country than
in this scene. She is as a mighty archangel, whose look
is lightning. She carries the purple garland of memory,
but all her sorrows are now past. "Beyond her, high
and far, in time and space, on backgrounds of flaming
light, on backgrounds of shadow, rise as mists in flame,
in the vapours of rainbows, the god-like phantoms of
i that world which shall be"--again Krasinski emphasizes
the words that were his hope. The verdure of new-
born life, the roses of spring, are round their brows.
They cast their crowns with a hymn of joy, while below
them "trembles in space a sea of sapphire light," at the
feet of her whom they hail as queen. Each wreath
bursts forth into rainbow hues. The rain of falling
flowers is one great flashing dawn, and the figure of
Poland is caught in a cloud of light and glory. The
voice of the Eternal Father speaks from heaven: "As
I gave My Son to the world so now I give to it thee,
oh, Poland": the idea being the theory we have seen
in The Treatise of the Trinity, and which was Kra-
sinski's firmly held tenet, that as Christ redeemed man-
kind by His death, so He appointed that one victim
nation should save the political universe also by death.
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? Dawn
243
And I saw the all universe
As one thought that is in flame.
Oh! I saw the all present form
Of God's glory without end,
Winds of comets, rings of planets,
Streams of stars o'er streams of stars,
Still more suns above the suns.
And across the seas of light
Flowed one harmony of life,
Song all thundering, all united,
Of the heavens, of the Son,
To the heavenly God the Father.
Athwart the all world unto God
Went the road of earthly nations:
And my Poland as their leader
Thither soared!
Whose eye
Can overtake her to those heights?
Who shall touch with earthly forehead
Even the feet of the Creator?
Who shall soar with the archangel
Where humanity takes flesh?
Now my heart faints in my bosom.
Vision fades, my thought is failing.
Oh, so madly I entreated,
Oh, so long I prayed to God
For that one, that only moment--
And I saw!
In that hour
Oh, remember that we were
On the highest height of souls--
There whence flows the source of life.
At the source of life we drank.
With our very eyes we grasped
What is still without a name.
Sister mine, we in that moment
Lived in our eternity.
They return to reality, but a changed reality : one
that is still labour and sadness, but to which a high
calling has given dignity, hope, purpose.
Throw off sadness, throw off terror.
Well I know what toil remaineth
16--2
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? The Anonymous Poet of Poland
On the road; what pain, what sorrow.
Trust thee to the poet's vision.
The dawn of victory now shines.
In our native land immortal,
On that soil so dearly loved,
On our soil, that soil of ours,
Shall arise a race renewed,
Never yet by man beheld.
And that new world all rejoicing
As a church shall flower to God.
The Polish land, the Polish Eden,
The desert of an age-long sadness,
Is desolate no more nor mourning.
Nor behind me nor before me
Is there darkness any more.
All is light and all is justice.
Clear is now our hallowed past,
Clear our purgatorial anguish.
Never shall thy spirit perish,
Poland mine, who art transfigured.
O'er earth's whirlwinds thou hast entered
To the land of the idea.
What the eye alone beholdeth
It shall pass into the ocean,
It shall fade away in chaos:
But the idea shall never die.
And so Krasinski's country, standing to him for
that deathless ideal:
Art to me no more mere country;
Thou art now my faith, my law.
Who betrays thee, who thee wrongeth,
Lieth he against his God:
because Poland is the depositary of God's thought, and
her resurrection the pledge of the future epoch of
humanity.
God Eternal of our fathers!
Thou, Who high and far away,
Ever clearer through the ages
Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest
From the eternal gates Thy sparks
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? Dawn
245
O'er time's waves until time flameth!
Now, again, Thy dawn is dawning
Which Thou in Thy love dost grant us.
In the graves the bones shall tremble,
Sighing in a hymn to Thee.
For our souls' and bodies' suffering,
For our hundred years of torment,
We do give Thee thanks, oh, Lord!
We are poor, and weak and feeble,
But from this martyrdom of ours
Has begun Thy reign on earth.
All warring elements shall be united in love. No
longer is the earth's cry of pain the sound that runs
through space, but in its stead a song of melody and
joy. The powerful shall oppress the weak never again.
Christ shall rule the world as He rules over heaven.
And so this song of a nation's resurrection closes in a
rapture of rejoicing that we cannot but believe hymns
likewise the deliverance of the poet's own soul from the
dark and desolate places in which he had long
wandered. The terrible past is but a dream.
Long the power of that dream.
We believed it. We believed
In eternal pain and toil.
It was but the sanctuary's entrance;
But one step upon the stairway.
It was but the night of merit.
Human heart, where now thy shame?
Look into thyself, oh, gaze!
Where of old was bitter weeping,
Rage and cries and lamentation,
Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy
Is the second house of God.
"Thus," sings the poet in the epilogue, "two exiles dreamed
in the dawning of a better dawn. What they felt in their hearts
they cast into these words. But the word alone is the empty
half" of the masterpieces of life. The only prayer worthy of
the Creator begins with a hymn, but knows no parting of the
thoughts with deeds. What it sings with its voice slowly it
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? 246 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
puts into form till it creates round about it the world of the real,
equal in beauty to the world of the ideal. Never, oh, never shall
I string more my harp. Other the roads that are open to us
now. Perish, my songs! Arise, my deeds!
"But thou, oh, loveliness I loved, the only sister of my life,
watch over me, be with me till I die as one small part in the
masterpiece of toils, till I die one verse in the hymn of sacrifice. "
Dawn appeared at the moment in the history of
Poland when she was the victim of an oppression that
sought to stamp out every vestige of her nationality;
when lethargy, despair, moral atrophy seemed all that
were left to her. In Dawn there came to her a call to
hope, a promise of resurrection, a cry of passionate love
for the country which within her boundaries it was for-
bidden to so much as name. Dawn gave the Poles a
motive for which to strive. 11 proved to them that death
was but the necessary condition of life. It pointed to a
future which should take away the sting from an intoler-
able present. The poem could only be smuggled at their
own risk by colporteurs into the country for which it
was written, read in secret under pain of imprisonment
and Siberia, and consigned to the flames or to some
safe hiding-place directly the reader had finished it.
Those who lived at the time have told us how they saw
men and women weeping tears of emotion as they
read1. Henceforth the unknown poet was enshrined in
the hearts of his people as their teacher and their con-
soler2.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. 2 Op. cit.
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? CHAPTER XI
THE PSALMS OF THE FUTURE: THE
PSALMS OF FAITH, OF HOPE, AND
OF LOVE
(1843-1847)
Krasinski's marriage with Elzbieta Branicka took place
in July, 1843, at Dresden.
The portraits that remain
of this lady, as well as the accounts given by those who
knew her, testify to a beauty that was almost flawless.
Her face with its tranquil and noble dignity, of the type
known to us as Early Victorian at its best, is often
repeated in the pictures of Ary Scheffer, the warm friend
and admirer of herself and her husband, who was wont
to say that he had never seen any other woman who so
much realized his ideal of loveliness. Her character,
firm, but of a singular sweetness, was in keeping with
her appearance. Her intellectual gifts were many. Yet
Krasinski married her with death in his soul, with no
pretence of love. That love was all given to his
Beatrice, from whom his marriage meant parting.
"My mind is shattered," he wrote to Delphina before his
marriage, after which he was to live in his father's palace in
Poland, "and drags itself to thy feet, beseeching for pity. All
with thee, all by thee, all for thee. Peace, strength, greatness,
all are attainable for me, all possible, but not without thee.
Think of my life. For fate, Siberia: for surroundings, a hated
house: for occupation, slavery: for hope, death1. "
1 Letters to Delphina Potocka. Tygodnik Illustrowany, 1898.
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? 248 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
To Cieszkowski, in whom he confided so unreserved-
ly that he called him his confessor, and from whom he
appears to have received a good many home truths in
reply, he wrote in the March after his betrothal:
Do not tell me that my subjectiveness is increasing. My
subjectiveness is now in Eternity. . . I have transported it there
where the sorrowful find rest, where the oppressed breathe
once more, and I have united it on those heights with the
spirit which, of all the women I have known, is perhaps the
highest on the earth in our days--the spirit to whose upraising
I contributed a little. The thought that I saved that soul, that
I am ever saving it, and that together with her I will wake
some day to the consciousness of past days, at the end of the
age-long labour of humanity, is the most precious pearl given
me by my fate. Beyond her all the rest is loathing and
suffering. To you I am interpreting the most hidden secrets
of my heart, and I of you expect that you will utter nothing
in the least formal on a feeling so strong, so holy that it can
even on this earth, and that in the nineteenth century, cast upon
their knees two beings, and for one moment open before them
the universal kingdom of God1.
While all was thus dark around him, and when no
external circumstance justified hope for Poland, the
grief and despondency of his beloved Gaszynski, whom
he remembered as a youth full of life and spirit in the
days of their boyhood in Warsaw, wrung from him
these words in which he begged him to take comfort:
Believe, in spite of all visible events, that a better hour is
now near, a second spring in our lives, a restored youth. Poland
will give us back, will give us back what we have lost for her,
joy, fire, the heart's health2.
His honeymoon was not over when again to Ciesz-
kowski, who it appears counselled him to stamp out
his love for Delphina, he wrote from Poland:
You think that it is possible to overcome the heart, that it
is possible to cast love into oblivion. . . I am a man in a false
1 Letters to Cieszkowski. Aix-en-Provence, March 25, 1843.
2 Letters to Gaszynski. Grenoble, June 1, 1843.
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? The Psalms of the Future 249
position, a man who a hundred times a day curses the moment
when he did for his father what even the heavenly Father has
no right to exact. . . Solitude has become my only relief, my
only comfort.
"If God permits," he adds at the end of the letter, " and if
my very soul does not become utterly corroded, I shall finish
in the winter the first part of the Undivine"--the new drama
Krasinski was writing as an introduction to The Undivine
Comedy. "But inspiration is difficult. . . where outside the house
is oppression and ignominy, and inside the house despair1. "
Long ago Krasinski's imaginative genius had in
Henryk of The Undivine Comedy prefigured his own
character as a husband. For the first part of his married
life coldness and indifference, the punctilious politeness
of duty, devotion to the ideal woman of his heart, were
the only return he made to his wife's forbearing love.
She had married him with the knowledge of his affec-
tion for another woman: but, drawn to him by sympathy
for the tragedy of his life and by admiration for his
genius and lofty patriotism, she was, Count Tarnowski
surmises, too young and inexperienced at the age of
twenty-three to realize the strength of his passion and
the position that she was bringing upon herself8. She,
meanwhile, bore all in uncomplaining silence, concealing
her grief, and setting herself to the task of winning her
husband's heart by her unalterable patience and readi-
ness to meet his wishes. The first two years of their
marriage were spent in Poland in the house of Wincenty
Krasinski who, fondly attached to his daughter-in-law,
viewed with the strongest disapproval his son's attitude
towards her. The situation, says Count Tarnowski,
was disagreeable to both husband and wife; "disagree-
able also," he adds drily, "to those who would wish to
1 Letters to Cieszkowski. Wierzenica, Aug. 14, 1843.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 250 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
see Krasinski free from all reproach and who cannot
justify his conduct1. " While not attempting to palliate
Krasinski's failings, still it is only fair to take into
account that he had been morally forced into marriage
by his father against his every instinct, and that his
peculiar temperament and highly-strung genius were
galled to the utmost by bonds for which he had an
innate repulsion. The strain of embittered domestic
relations, the reproaches of conscience that with Kra-
sinski were always insistent, increased his grief. From
time to time he still unveiled his heart in passionate
and despairing lyrics to Delphina Potocka.
"Pray thou for me," so runs the poem that he wrote
to her the year after his marriage, which in an early
manuscript he called Last Lines:
when too early I die for the sins of my fathers and for my own
sin. Pray thou for me, that even in my grave grief eternal for
thee shall not torment me as hell. Pray thou for me that
before God in heaven after ages of ages I shall meet thee once
more, and there at least rest together with thee, for all to me
here is mourning and toil. Pray thou for me. In vain have I
lived, because that thy heart is now turning from me. Pray
thou for me. I faithfully loved thee: even as measureless
measure is without measure I loved thee. Pray thou for me,
for unhappy am I; straight is my heart, but crooked my lot.
Pray thou for me, and speak no reproach, for thou only art
my sister on earth. Pray thou for me, for no other soul's
prayer can now move my heart, but can only redouble the gall
of my grief. Pray thou for me. To thee I still cling, and on
this earth save thee I have nought, and besides thee of nought
beyond this world do I dream. Only I dream that with my
sad soul thine to the immortal shall flow one with mine. Then
pray thou for me, for thy brother am I.
1 Op. cit. Dr Kallenbach's monograph at present takes us no further
than the year 1838. We have no access to the family papers, and must
rely almost exclusively upon Count Tarnowski, related by marriage with
the Branicki family.
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? The Psalms of the Future 251
Yet in these years, while in his domestic relations
Krasinski fell far short of his higher self, his work for
his nation was reaching ever further to its noblest
realization. The discord between the ideal and reality
of the poet's surroundings could not shake his faith
in the truth of that ideal. In Warsaw he saw before
his eyes on all sides the terrorism of Russian Poland:
a generation brought up as a conquered people.
"The youth," he wrote to Soitan, "are in the most lament-
able condition. They are taught historical lies and blasphemies,
they are oppressed in every way, they are flogged for the
lightest offence, for the want of a button or for a white hand-
kerchief round their necks instead of the prescribed black
one; for the possession of any trifling book they are sent to
prison: in a word, those who are beginning life are far more
unhappy than those who are ending it. Decaying age is the
golden age on these plains. Hence there is among our youth
an unheard-of sadness full of unrest, and even of reproaches
against fate, or of irreligion. Their hearts are becoming
accustomed to complain even of God, for nobody teaches them
who God is, and in the name of religion and of the govern-
ment they continually experience indescribable torments. So
the present generation is growing up sad and godless, with
confused ideas, soured and embittered in the flower of their
years, but at the same time full of hatred and courage, but not
our courage of old which never calculated and was pure self-
sacrifice. Their courage is the energy of slaves, not of free and
highborn men. They do not mind the means if only the end
is acquired. This is the necessary result of a soul darkened. . .
by unhappiness and pain like slaves. And such a soul does
not know that it is never possible to reach by evil means a
great, holy, durable end. . . It is obvious that such a systematic
moral slaying of youth is a powerful means for the sapping
away of our strength. It is a hellish invention for the ruin, not
only of the present but of the future. To murder the child in
its mother's womb, that is its object.
"But, Adam," he goes on, "do not be saddened overmuch
on reading this picture which I have drawn here. This picture,
these details, are our martyrdom, are our test, but they are
not the end, not the final truth. It is necessary to pass through
this. Did not Christ in spite of His divinity experience the
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? 252
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
final doubt? Did He not pass through the bitterness of all
bitternesses? And so that He might rise again He had of
necessity not only to pass through death, but in the moment
of death itself to experience the most cruel of moral sufferings
. . . That last cry of His to the Father was at once the highest
degree of pain and merit, and therefore of sacrifice. Not
otherwise could He have emptied the chalice to its last drop,
and it was necessary to drink that last drop so that nothing
should remain. Then only shall death be changed into life,
pain into joy, defeat into victory: non est saltus in natura!
We, only looking at facts with the eyes of the body, might
often doubt; but we know that even doubt is only the highest
pain, and no proof, no truth, but on the contrary. . . a sign that
the hour of rebirth is near. . . It has rejoiced my soul that I
have been able to bring you some comfort, however transitory
--the one which you tell me is lying in your drawer \Dawn\
That, idea is my faith, my hope, my love. Without it I should
breathe my last, with it I live. And do not think that our life
has passed and that we have not beheld the Divine Justice,
albeit we are glimpsing at its beginning. All for which I weep
here are our last tears. . . Without such a faith, without such an
idea, there is no life, and with it even death itself does not
cease to be life. Then how should we not believe?
"We must be sad because we are human beings, because
the flesh is weak, but at the same time we shall often rejoice,
because the spirit is willing though the flesh is weak, and God's
Spirit is within us and in ours and in our cause, which by no
accident of chance has befallen at the end of one of the epochs
of humanity and at the beginning of another. Our corpse is
the bridge of transition for humanity. When it shall reach the
other shore we shall rise living. And let us eternally know
and feel that where there is hellish injustice, there the Divine
Justice must manifest itself; where men have not known how
to love, there God shall love. Otherwise the universum would
break. One God and one law and one truth! I enclose for
you here a Psalm written in that faith, in that hope, in that
love [the Psalm of Hope]1. "
This letter speaks for itself as to the nature of the
Anonymous Poet's apostolate. It was for this genera-
tion of young Poles, exposed to the fearful perils which
1 Letters to Sot tan. May 12, 17, 1844.
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? The Psalms of the Future 253
he here describes, that Krasinski wrote Dawn and was
now writing the Psalms of the Future.
It is noticeable that, with the exception perhaps of
his short lyrics, Krasinski never wrote for the pure
artistic joy of creation. He wrote for the sake of his
country, and only when she had need of his words. N
Thus it was that, although he had declared his intention y
in the epilogue to Dawn never to write again, but to
devote himself exclusively to action, he found himself
confronted with a great national crisis when the only
way in which he could warn his nation was by his song:
and thus rose the Psalms of the Future.
The Psalms of the Future were, as Dr Kleiner
points out to us, a complete departure from the method
of Krasinski's former work1. The Undivine Comedy and
Iridion were appeals to his fellow-countrymen under
allegorical or veiled forms. Dawn is a rapture of
spiritualized patriotism where lights of aheavenly mystic
country play as in the poetry of the Hebrew prophets.
The Psalms are the concrete and practical development
of Krasinski's system, in which he employs the instru-
ment of poetic form because it was the one most adapted
to compel hearing and conviction upon those to whom
they were spoken. With the culmination of his idea,
says again Dr Kleiner, Krasinski's language and
meaning become simplified: and the same interpreter
of the Anonymous Poet lays emphasis on the somewhat
curious fact that of the three great Polish mystic poets,
Krasinski, in contrast to Mickiewicz and Stowacki,
was the only one who brought the national mysticism
down to a lucidity that any mind could grasp2.
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Ibid.
? ? 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
? 254 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
The first three Psalms, and more especially the first
in point of time though placed as the third in the
series, the Psalm of Love, differ also from the
previous writings of Krasinski inasmuch as they are
directed to meet a given occasion. During Krasinski's
comparatively long stay in the Kingdom of Poland
after his marriage he was closely watching the political
and moral conditions under which the youth of his
nation were growing up, and which were goading a
certain party among them into a revolution, not of a
merely national, but of a socialistic and even a Jacobin
nature. A young Pole, whose name Krasinski's friend,
from whom we have these particulars, does not give,
and who was already dead when they were written, came
to Krasinski with the secret that a new rising was
being prepared, which the lower classes were to be
induced to join by the promise of equality of lands and
rights, and of a popular government when the move-
ment should have succeeded1. The youth begged
Krasinski to throw in his adherence with the party.
Krasinski refused; and this was not merely because he
was imbued with aristocratic tendencies and because,
his sympathies being with his own order, he had small
belief in the ruling capabilities of the populace. His
clear political acumen was not at fault.