No More Learning

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? 268 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
friendship only closed by Krasinski's death. After Kra-
sinski had left this world Kozmian published Zygmunt's
letters that he bequeathed to his descendants as the
most precious of legacies: and in the touching notes
which he added to them he tells us how he ranked the
Anonymous Poet "highest among men," and that the
memory of him "will strengthen and support me to the
last of my days1. "
Borne down as Krasinski was by his heavy sadness
in the fresh national tragedy, his spirit struggled, against
mental distress and physical incapacity, to give his
nation help. In October, 1846, he wrote to Delphina
Potocka:
"I tried if that penalty of speechlessness would not leave
me. I sat for four hours, but all was astray, till at times despair
seized me that such a state of sterility could befall a man's
soul. Oh, my Dialy, pray for me to God. I feel nothing
egotistic in that desire, but I feel that such a sketch"--the
poem he was attempting to write--" is needed: for Poland"
--he calls her by a veiled name--" is driven by all the winds.
She implores, she implores for counsel V
Early in the following year he tells Trentowski:
I have lost all certitude and mental balance. I am not
certain even for one moment of my thoughts or expressions or
of rhythm or any sound. . . That state is a cursed one. I have
been struggling with it for this year past, and if you could only
know how madly, how bitterly, at times how passionately, and
more often with what despair. The voice of a luring, com-
pelling destiny rings constantly by day and night in my ears.
I would fain follow it, and some infernal power keeps me back.
Now only God knows if I can find again my lost powers and
if I shall ever again be able to clothe in shape the thought and
feeling, to put into words the longing and love, vainly seething
in my heart, into external sound--to create something. I
would wish only once more, and this when there is such urgent
1 Op. tit. Introduction.
a Jubilee edition. Vol. VI, p. 369.
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? The Psalms of the Future 269
need, to tear from my heart the Idea of all my life, and then
let my heart break1.
The result of this labour of soul and body was
Resurrecturis, spiritually speaking perhaps Krasinski's
most sublime poem. Although written at this time, it
was not published, probably because it did not satisfy
the poet, and he intended to rewrite it. Only in 1851
did it appear, as it first stood, with a few trifling altera-
tions. It therefore belongs to the closing chapter of
Krasinski's work for his people, and will find its place
there. But two other poems that Krasinski had begun
in former years were now finished and published in
Paris in 1847: To-Day and The Last.
1 Letters, Vol. III. To Trentowski. Nice, Jan. 2, 1847.
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? CHAPTER XII
TO-DAY, THE LAST, AND THE LAST
PSALMS OF THE FUTURE
(1847-1848)
As a whole To-Day falls below the level of Krasinski's
great national work. The first speech of the dying man
and the demon's monologue are ranked very high by
Count Tarnowski, and it is said that Mickiewicz, pene-
trating Krasinski's disguise, gave enthusiastic praise to
one of its passages1. But after the opening the poem
drags. All that is noblest in its sentiments Krasinski
had said before and with greater force: he was at the
moment too spent to speak with the accents of a Psalm
of Love or a Psalm of Good Will.
A Pole--Krasinski himself--lies dying. Around
his bed stand his friends, each holding national opinions
which are at variance with his, and from whom, in the
sadness and weariness of the life that is ebbing away,
he turns, praying to be left in peace. Two stanzas where
the dying man's wandering fancy returns to his Polish
plains contain a poetic and exquisite touch of nature,
foreign to Krasinski's usual style, and more akin to the
work of other poets of his nation.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? To-Day and The Last 271
Oh, come ye, then, come through the hamlets of home,
through the green of the meads and the billows of corn. There
in each ear of corn murmurs the nation's grief. There does the
lily of the field for vengeance cry. In that wide space save for
the whispers of the forests nothing shall you hear; and in the
forests there are graves of green and stones, and in each grave
a martyr sleeping lies, and o'er him pine trees sing the hymn
of death.
Then he prays that he may not die with his despair
for his nation unrelieved. Where is the angel who had
promised him succour in his last hour? This refers to
Delphina Potocka, Krasinski having written this part
of the poem in the years of his love for her before his
marriage. He sees instead his "Satan," come to tell
him that his country is destined to purchase the life of
the world by her everlasting death, which is of course
in direct opposition to the Krasinskian ideal of death
leading to new life. Let the dying man bow to reason
and necessity. But still he refuses to be overcome by
the specious temptation. He answers--and here Kra-
sinski is influenced by the theory on which much of
his hope for Poland depended--that the tempter is:
only the half of universal life. From thy lips flows the word
of eternal death because thou knowest blind force, not what
is will. The desire of many hearts can descend as angels to
the grave, and an angelic strength pour into bones and dust.
God cast the seed of miracle into the will of man. Eternal
humility in tears and blood--before God. Undying strife in
tears and blood--before the foe. This is our fate, our faith,
our conscience.
And, still calling upon her whom he loved to fulfil
her promise, he sinks into what the bystanders believe
is death.
It is now the turn of his friends to speak. They do
so, some ten of them, one after the other. For the most
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? 272 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part each of them urges a special line of policy,
which Krasinski held to be injurious to his country:
an exclusive aristocracy, democracy, communism, Pan-
slavism, and so on, which they reproach their dead
friend for not having supported. In the speech of one
there are words so descriptive of Krasinski himself that
they sufficiently prove whom the dying man represents.
"See," says he, pointing to the face upon the bed; "on those
features grief for his nation has blotted out all else: that grief
which for a hundred years tears every heart in Poland. Blessed
that grief which is the proof of immortality: that purgatorial,
provident and shielding grief which, as religion, unites us who
are torn apart. "
The fame of the dead man must be not that he was
an aristocrat, democrat or any of the rest, but: "if you
would mark him out by any sign, call him a Pole, for he
loved Poland. In this love he lived and in it died. "
Such might well be Krasinski's epitaph.
At this moment the dying Pole regains conscious-
ness. He hears the "voice of my angel, the voice of
my spring, eternally remembered, eternally beloved. "
"O, let them also see thee," he prays, for then they
will understand their errors and how they must conquer
in the war for Poland. Though he should spend an
eternity of joy with his angel it would not be joy if she,
refusing to appear to them, leaves them in their mental
wandering and "my Poland sad. " She hears his prayer.
The watchers fall upon their knees, and as her voice
repeats the phrase: "Poland shall be in the name of
the Lord," they one by one confess that they have
sinned and erred.
One tells in all Krasinski's fervid imagery--this was
the passage by which Mickiewicz recognized the identity
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? To-Day and The Last 273
of the author of the poem--of the horror of the Galician
massacres, and at the voice from above: "his heart
breaks, his thought is shattered. " Another, as he said, had
urged upon his nation to fling away her diadem of thorns
and yield herself to the embraces of the false lover who
will be her destroyer. H is long speech is the refutation of
Wielopolski's famous Lettre dun Gentilhomme Polonais
au Prince de Metternich, in which the Pole, whose name
twenty years later was to be the object of violent national
passions, advocated a Polish reconciliation with Russia
on lines which no Polish independent would accept.
"Forgive me, forgive," the speaker concludes, weeping.
"See how I sob, and how I love my Poland. Through
pain I lost my reason. " A fourth says he lost not reason,
but heart, through the same suffering. So each tells his
sin against his nation. The heavenly voice promises
forgiveness on the condition of their individual virtue.
"The Almighty Himself cannot lay the dawn of ages
in an impure heart. "
"Alas! " reply the dying man's friends in chorus. "Our errors
rose from our despair. By law we were bidden to live by
crimes, by law bidden to be spies, by law bidden to betray son,
father, brother. Even in God's temples the name of Poland
was as a foul word. Only was it free to utter that name aloud
--from the scaffold. "
"Repay her," the voice answers, "for her cross by
your good deeds," and to that the chorus: "There is
one road by which we must go to Poland as to God, by
that which never was defiled. "
All that is now left for the dying Pole is to urge his
brothers to be of good heart, for the day so often pro-
phesied by the Anonymous Poet shall be theirs.
I shall not be with you when on that day your hearts re-
sound with hymns, when, as the Jewish prophets sang, the
g. 18
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? 274 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
rainbow-hued clouds descend on you from high. Oh, be pure,
be holy, and what I have foretold shall be fulfilled for you by
a just God.
So he dies: and the last words of the poem are
spirit voices, his and the angel's, repeating from unseen
worlds: "Poland shall be in the name of the Lord. "
The second poem \vhich Krasinski brought out now
-- The Last--is of all his poetic work the most in line
with other European verse. It was begun years before,
perhaps even as early as the time when the poet, almost
a boy, visited with Mickiewicz the dungeon of Chillon
which gave him the idea of the poem. Told in narrative
form, in style equal to the best in that particular type1,
The Last is the story of a Polish poet who has languished
for twenty years in a Siberian dungeon. If here and
there in the beginning faintly reminiscent of Byron's
Prisoner of Chillon, as indeed it was almost bound to
be, Krasinski soon carries his poem up to those higher
planes where at the period of life when he com-
pleted it he dwelt familiarly. Moreover, The Last is
impregnated with that terrible tragedy of real fact which
must of necessity be found in the work of any Pole of
Krasinski's day, when telling the all too well-known tale
of exile and of prison. The captive of The Last has in
fact been identified with two different Poles whose long
martyrdom is conspicuous even in the via dolorosa of
Poland's national records: Roman Sanguszko, deported
to Siberia and personally condemned by Nicholas I to
make the journey on foot, and tukasinsJiL-whose prison
was his living tomb. But Count Tarnowski adduces
the internal evidence of the poem as proof that its
spokesman is intended for no other than Krasinski him-
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? To-Day and The Last 275
self. The poet's foreboding that he would end his days
in Siberia amounted almost to obsession.
The prisoner tells his story. He has rotted for years
in his underground cell, chained by a hook to the wall.
Days, months, years dragged on, and all his hopes died.
He struggled against the death of his soul, against de-
spair, against the dying out of reason. In the cells above
his where light and air penetrated were confined those
whose crimes in the eyes of the Tsar were less than his.
They had murdered a mother, a father, a brother. He
was a Pole who had loved his country and sung of her
to his countrymen.
To no one I confided my last thought. To my beloved
ones I did not bid farewell. At night--without a trace, in
silence and in secret, the prison cart hurled me away; and only
the stars of Poland may remember those first and hidden, those
my journeys after death.
The Tsar condemned him to his fate:
And I went on foot to beyond the world, into this ice, I, son
of the Republic of Poland and of freedom, among the fettered
droves of criminals.
He was driven into the far north at the end of the
knout.
Would to God I had died in the beginning of my martyr-
dom. But we die not when death is our salvation. Thou shalt
die in the day of joy, thou shalt perish in the day of victory.
But when thou livest in pain thou art immune.
And in a transport of suffering he crjes:
Ah, where are my native flowering plains? Where are my
fields of corn, the marshes of my meadows? Where are the
woods of pines, murmuring o'erhead like a strange, secret
prayer? Where is the people that calls Mary Queen?
At this sudden awakening of memory that he be-
lieved had been crushed out by captivity he, for the
first time for many a year, weeps. Thought is not dead
18--2
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? 276 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after all.
He remembers his past visions of the advent
of the Paraclete to renovate humanity and of the great
mission of his country; Who knows but that transfi-
guration may have already taken place in the world to
which he has perished? He feels his chains no longer
The prison walls fade. The spring green of the Polish
meads stretches before his eyes, and he sees a multitude
of Poles with the national banners of crimson and white.
Horsemen in his hallucination detach themselves from
the others, and gallop to the north across the Russian
steppes towards the prisons of Siberia. One moment
more, and he will be delivered: "and Poland shall
enter in my prison to give me back what I have lost
for her--my life1. "
Krasinski's poem was to have ended here with the
release of the prisoner whose history he in the first
instance entitled, not The Last, but The Delivered.
All this part was written prior to the year 1846 while
Krasinski was under the dominion of such hopes as in-
spired Dawn. Then occurred the catastrophe of the
Galician massacres. In his grief of mind Krasinski
changed the end of the poem into tragedy, while at the
same time the fear of Siberia under which he had
written The Delivered left him, and yielded to a longing
for death as his only deliverance. The existence of the
Polish prisoner is unknown to the rescuers. They are
told that there are no Poles in the fortress. Within sight
of the walls they turn back, and he, "the last," is left
behind, the only Pole to whom the prison doors are not
opened. Transports of rage shake his soul. Blasphemies
stream from his lips. Then he chances to pronounce
the name of Poland.
1 See the identical expression in the letter to Gaszynski of June 1,1843.
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? To-Day and The Last 277
Poland! Poland! It is true she has arisen. Lord! is it true?
To-day all Poland no more awaiteth death in chains as I?
Forgive me, Lord, for Poland did I love. She liveth on the
earth and Thou in heaven. And therefore do I die, blessing
Thy name for ever, everywhere, before and in the grave. With
Thine and Poland's name upon these lips which in a few
moments shall be stone, I die. Holy Thy will! Holy my long
bondage, holy the terrors of my lonely death, since now no
longer torn asunder is the sweet soil of my sires.
And, hearing heavenly Hosannas, death delivers
him.
In both To-Day and The Last there runs the strain
of a conspicuous weariness. But this is apparent no
longer in the poems that followed them in 1848, the
concluding Psalms of the Future. The fact that in all
these poems, and in marked measure in the Psalms,
the Anonymous Poet could rise above the horror of
what 1846 had brought upon his nation, and still speak
to her in words of hope, was the greatest victory that
even he had ever won. He won it through and for the
love of Poland. The Galician massacres however left
their deep traces on his national idea. Dr Kleiner notes
that the theory of the dependence of Poland's resur-
rection on each Pole's personal purity of heart and deed,
which Krasinski had already indicated in various of his
works, now became paramount.
While the motive of the Psalm of Grief was Kra-
sinski's wish to console and fortify his nation in the
affliction in which she was then plunged, its immediate
cause was the attack made by Stowacki against the
tenets of the Psalm of Love. Stowacki circulated in
manuscript a fine poem of which the form was partly
modelled on that of Krasinski's Psalm of Love, in
which he mercilessly derided, with more than one per-
sonal thrust at the Anonymous Poet, the latter's fore-
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? 278 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
bodings. Against the knowledge or desire of its author
who, after strained relations with Krasinski on account
of a personal matter, had renewed his friendship with
him, this poem was published in 18481. In a few words
of introduction to his fourth Psalm Krasinski stated his
intention of answering his brother-poet's poem, the style
of which he praises unreservedly; and he then opens
his Psalm of Grief.
Stowacki had thrust in Krasinski's teeth the taunt:
"Thou wert afraid, son of a noble. " "Did terror speak
from me," replies Krasinski, without passion, "when I
foresaw that we were going forward into darkness, not
to dawn? " Yes, his accuser spoke truth. He trembled
indeed, but at the sight of evil menacing his country,
when he sees murder and ignominy ready to descend
upon her.
"Let the Lord judge between my fear, thy courage.
Would to God thou hadst truly prophesied," continues
the poet to whose warnings the truth had been given
in blood. "Would to God I had been the liar, thou
the inspired prophet, and that no stain rested on our
country's plains! "
In Krasinski's self-vindication against the man who
had once been his friend, whose work Krasinski had
publicly praised when Stowacki had had the chagrin of
seeing it passed over in silence, once only a bitter re-
tort passes his lips. Had Krasinski been proved in the
wrong, "we should both have walked in gladness, thou
with thy own glory, I with the redemption of Poland. "
1 Stowacki had fallen in love with Mme Bobrowa who, still devoted to
Krasinski, did not reciprocate his affection, and had spoken of her in some
disparaging terms when writing to Krasinski. The latter resented these
for the lady's sake, and a coldness ensued between the two poets.
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? The Psalms of the Future
279
Beyond this single stab at Sfowacki's egotism Kra-
sinski's whole answer breathes a dignity and a
nobility that would not descend to the acrimonies of
personal strife. His concern was not with individual
considerations, but with the substance of Sfowacki's
theories. Sfowacki had urged progress with no regard
to the means by which it should be secured: "the
triumph of the soul," says Dr Kleiner, "albeit in the
midst of blood and ruins1. " This was of course a doctrine
directly opposed to that which Krasinski held was life.
After the personal preliminaries which poetically
are great, the style of the poem deteriorates far below
the standard of the two Psalms between which it stands.
The nobility of the Psalm 0/ Grief lies not in its form
but in its matter. Krasinski was now developing nothing
further. He was recapitulating what he had already
taught. The Psalm of Grief is the plea that he had
often uttered for the works of the Spirit against those
of human baseness. Eternal is the strife between the
beast and the idea: blood, violence, destruction are the
inheritance of every century.
Who shall redeem us? Who draw out harmony from the
battle of place and years? He in Whose depths is the height
of life, in Whom flesh and spirit move at one--the Holy Ghost
Beneath His rule the earth shall weep no more in blood. In
the morning He waketh to hope the people that slumber. He
shall hasten to make the dark of the deep pools silver till the
morn waxeth into the broader day.
With an increasing want of poetical fire Krasinski
goes on to tell of the general judgment on the ages:
how, with the avenging angels sweeping down like
hurricanes upon them, they stand trembling on the
brink of the pit of damnation till clinging heart to
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 280 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
heart they are redeemed, because while they were sun-
dered they were as hell, and when they become brothers
they are saved. In the third part Krasinski points once
more to the ideals that alone can bring salvation to
man, a nation, the human race: purity, the love that
accepts toil, the courage that does not shrink from
suffering.
Be unpolluted in the midst of vileness. In the midst of
outrage hold fast thy love. Let thy heart be strong as steel,
and thine eyes weep over every alien grief--and so reach God
by the one chain of deed, by a pure and sincere soul.
And I gaze 'midst the whirlwind at the death shroud of the
skies, and I hear amidst the clouds the choir of those risen
from the dead. Ah! a voice I know! But the blood shed by
vengeance shall not touch the cause of Poland.
She shall shun all evil if she would both live and
banish eternal death from the nations. "Thus shall be
the resurrection": and so the Psalm of Grief closes on
the note of hope.
We now reach the poem that brings the epoch of
the national mysticism which rose out of the sorrows of
the Polish Rising to its magnificent close--the Psalm
of Good Will. Here, with the full powers not only of
his poetical genius but of a great heart and soul,
Krasinski spoke the last and grandest word of his
nation's prophetic and mystic nationalism. Under every
aspect this Psalm is the supreme masterpiece of the
Anonymous Poet of Poland. The exultation of Dawn
is absent. Nor is there any abandonment of grief.
With the dignity of one who, after long battling with
the tempest had gained the goal, Krasinski turns to his
people with his farewell message. The deep and sorrow-
ful accents of the Psalm roll on like the tones of a
great organ till they die away in the Anonymous Poet's
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? The Psalms of the Future 281
last prayer for Poland that hers may be not earthly
glory, as the world knows it, but good will.
The peculiar correspondence of Krasinski's national
mysticism with that of the unit is perhaps more ap-
parent in the Psalm of Good Will than in any other of
Krasinski's directly patriotic work. The conditions of
moral resurrection, the struggle against temptation, the
all conquering power of the will, as Krasinski sings of
them in relation to a country, not only read as a page
of a soul's experience; but in at least one line Krasinski
distinctly argues that, as of the man, so of a nation.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh,
Lord. " Each stanza of the Psalm begins with these
words until the scene of the final temptation, and each
closes with the petition: "Now that Thy judgment has
thundered in heaven on the two thousand years that
have passed, grant us, oh, Lord, in the midst of this
judgment to raise ourselves to life by holy deeds. " In
both of these refrains is contained the epitome of the
whole moral idea of the Psalm of Good Will. Every
gift has been bestowed upon the nation; her salvation,
as with the individual soul, depends upon her response
to the vocation with which she has been endowed and
called to carry out. Now let her answer the Divine
summons by deed.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh,
Lord": rule for a thousand years, a history of love
unstained by the lust of conquest1. "When we de-
scended from the life of the Capitol [i. e. the heights of
power2] into the pit of our dismemberment, Thou
didst keep us who were dead living upon the field of
1 See Chapter X, pp. 237, 238.
2 Note to Jubilee edition. Vol. V, p. 73.
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? 282 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
war. We were not, and behold, we were": as soldiers
in the Polish legions on the battle-fields of Europe.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
the purest life and therefore worthy of the cross, and the cross
itself, but such a cross as brings us to Thy stars. Earth Thou
didst take from us and heaven send down, and on all sides
Thy heart doth shelter us. But our free will Thou hadst to
leave to us. Without ourselves Thyself canst not redeem us;
for so hast Thou ennobled man and every nation that Thy
design, on high suspended, awaits till by their choice men
and a nation go upon their destined roads. Forever is Thy
Spirit the spouse of freedom only.
An eternal idealist, Krasinski has, his own country-
men are the first to acknowledge, transfigured the history
of Poland. If however his language may be called that
of a lover, not of sober fact, is, pertinently asks Count
Tarnowski, the conclusion of Krasinski's whole teaching
and of the life which was one long labour to attain it,
erroneous because his premisses were at fault1? Does
not this glorification in itself lead directly to the rigorous
truth of his summons to the battle that can, and it alone,
make a nation worthy of her heroic destiny2? This is
not the place to enter into an argument as to whether
the reminder of past failings or the appeal to live up
to a sublime ideal, whether it had in reality ever been
reached or no, were the more profitable spiritual spur.
Krasinski chose the latter.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
the example of Thy unhappy Jerusalem in whom Thy love
dwelt so long.
The conception of a certain analogy between the
lot of Poland and of Sion is not uncommon in Polish
mysticism: but Krasinski viewed it on a curiously
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Op. tit. See also J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt
Krasinski.
? ? 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 Psalms of the Future
different line to that of Mickiewicz or Goszczynski.
The resemblance was to him a sinister one1. Jerusalem
had fallen for ever. Krasinski's idea is that Poland
must take warning for should her sins be like to those
of the Hebrew race--the disdain of the cross and of
the law of love--by which Jerusalem "lost her queen-
ship and is now a widow," the fate of his nation shall
be like S ion's.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
in the example of the foul deeds of wrong of our oppressors,
for which the weeping of our children curses them, for which
they stand by the shame of their own hearts ashamed before
Thee. Not by the death of others, but by their own, all crimes
finish without fruit upon this earth.
Then for the first time in the Psalm of Good Will
the note of a mortal anguish sounds. The moment is
here of the conflict for life or death that beats around
the poet's country, defeat in which means not only her
ruin but the retrogression of all humanity. Krasinski
represents it with the strange imagery peculiar to him
in which perhaps it were not wholly fanciful for the
English reader to discern some resemblance to the
painted clouds and mists and waves of Watts, illuminated
by the celestial vision of a devout son of the most
Catholic of lands.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord.
We are above the abyss upon the narrow pass. Our wings are
growing to the resurrection, our lips are parted for the cry of
joy. Towards us from the blue, as from Thy bosom, golden
shafts of dawn as though Thine arms are hastening from the
heavens to the earth, to take from our foreheads the load of
agelong sorrows. All is ready. The east is all aflame. The
angels gaze. And there on yonder side is the dark beneath
the unbottomed sinking of the shore. And the abyss is rising
surging, growing, sweeping on us--eternal death where Thou
art not, which from all time engulfs the proud and evil, and
1 J. Kleiner, op. cit.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu.