No More Learning

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.
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? 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. He saw that
the time in Poland was not at that moment ripe for any
democratic propaganda. The conditions in an oppressed
country were too abnormal for a class agitation to be
productive of anything except anarchy. Krasinski was
parted by only two generations from the French Re-
volution: and when he heard that the Polish democratic
1 St. Matachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of Zygmunt
Krasinski. See St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Psalms of the Future 255
leaders were prepared to have recourse to terrorism if
necessary he foresaw consequences far beyond what
the promoters of the rising had in view. In 1844 a
Polish exile, Henry-k-Xamienski, brought out a work
entitled: Life-giving Truths for the Polish Nation by
Filaret Prawdoski--the latter word being derived
from the Polish for truth, Prawda. On a different line
to Krasinski's he too called Poland to the leadership of
nations; but one that was to be acquired by a rising of
every class in the land. This movement was to link
itself to a great social revolution. The revolution should
be bloodless if possible, but were bloodshed and violence
to be indispensable they must be employed. "We will
serve the revolution without regard as to whether it
shall be compelled to unfurl the white or the red flag1. "
The redness of Kamienski's views obscured much that
was noble in his outlook and alienated numbers of
Poles who otherwise would have rallied to his side2.
In such language sown broadcast among a people per-
secuted and deprived of all stable landmarks Krasinski
saw the gravest peril to Poland.
Appalled then by the danger that was approaching
his country, the Anonymous Poet sent forth an im-
passioned entreaty to his countrymen in the only form
that could reach them. He wrote his Psalm of Love.
But in order that its lessons should more deeply
penetrate to the hearts of his compatriots he wrote the
Psalm ofTaithandihePsalmofJLope as its introduction,
and as the recapitulation of the theories on which the
point of his warning depended3. They were all three
1 Life-giving Truths for the Polish Nation, by Filaret Prawdoski,
Brussels, 1844 (Polish).
2 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 256 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
published simultaneously in 1845 under the pseudonym
Spiridion Prawdzicki, the name Spiridion taken from
George Sand's Spiridion, which treats of Krasinski's
favourite ideas on the new epoch, and the second name
chosen as a challenge to that of Kamienski.
In the Psalm of Faith Krasinski enunciates his act
of faith in the personality of God, in the life of the soul,
in the life of his nation and of the human race.
Appreciations of style are matters which a foreign
writer would do well to leave to native critics: and so
we point to the emphasis that Count Tarnowski lays
upon the perfect harmony that in the Psalm of Faith
reigns between word and matter, the clearness and
conciseness, often lacking in Krasinski's work, with
which a simple diction treats of sublime things1. The
opening of the Psalm, the fine description of the soul's
pilgrimage to its highest good, is significant of the far
road on which Krasinski had travelled since, in doubt
and distress, he sang a similar theme in The Son of
Darkness.
My soul2 and my body are only two wings with which the
meshes of time and of space are cut by my spirit in its flight to
the heights. Worn out by time and by a thousand trials they
must fall--but the spirit dies not, though men call this death.
It casts off the wings that are withered and taketh on fresh,
and folded in these wakes to life once again: and this do we
call the hour of its birth. And my spirit takes to itself un-
wearied wings, and with them soars once again--but now
to a higher land. Thus ever higher it mounts to the Lord.
Behind it are twilight gulfs of the past. Before it wide
plains of the all measureless. Before it the universe--time,
endless space, storeys of milky ways and days of thousand
years. And further, higher, o'er them and beyond them He
Who is all and Who embraceth all, Creator Spirit of the stars,
1 Op. tit.
2 Krasinski here uses the word "soul" not in its ordinary significance
but rather as meaning the mind.
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? The Psalms of the Future 257
of angels and of man, the end and the beginning of heaven
and of earth, He Who for ever higher, further is, not to be
reached, flaming o'er all, rest and together quickening strength,
light of the Most High Spirit-Sun of spirits.
To Him do I ever travel. Thither I first must go through
the toils of hell, through purgatorial trial, till I begin to put
me on body and soul more radiant and ascend to the other
world: to the world that from the ages is called the globe of
heaven; and there no longer need I swoons of death or waking
from the grave to ascend more high. For there is life eternal,
life that ceaseth not. The grave and cradle must be here
below upon this earth wherein the spirit's light is only dawn:
but for the angels death shall never be. The future and the
past with piercing eyes they see and know.
The desire of the spirit that has reached this angelic
life is God: "desire without measure that grows with
each minute, love without bounds, that is life without
end. "
He is the centre of creation bound with one chain, He,
Being, Mind and Life, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And all
of us and everywhere we are fashioned in His image and, by
degrees to ever higher possession ascending, we must immortal
live, with Him together live, born of His bosom, live in His
eternity. And even as He created us, so we must still create,
and from within us draw out worlds to weave to Him, as He
did weave for us, vesture of visible things; and in as far as
we can who are poor, we must with the lowliness of angels
give back to Thee what Thou didst give us of Thy mercy,
Lord, and yet be able never, never, to give back aught to
Thee, and thus eternally live in Thee by eternal love.
Thus for the reciprocal relation of God with man. In
the light of the Krasinskian theory on the application
of individual mysticism to that of nationality and the
human race, it is but one step to the conclusion of the
Psalm of Faith. For: "the history of mankind is the
school of the soul. " The human race is advancing to
the day of judgment and to the transfiguration of
humanity.
G.
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? 258 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
The stairs that lead us to that day are the nations conceived
in Thy grace. In each of them lives some deep thought that
is the breath sent down upon them from Thy breast, and from
that time is for the nation its predestined calling. And beyond
all others some are chosen to combat for Thy beauty on this
earth and, for long years, carrying the cross with its bleeding
trail, to win by conflict man's higher thought of Thee, a greater
love and greater brotherhood in barter for the murderer's knife
planted within their breast.
Such a one, oh, God, is Thy Polish nation. Though the
world giveth her such pain that she might despair of hope,
may she stand steadfast through unheard-of suffering, for, of a
truth, she is Thy chaplain on this earth if she is not ashamed
of the crown of thorns, if she will understand that Thou lovest
without measure those sons whom Thou dost crown with
thorns: for the thorn imbrued in blood is the everlasting flower,
with which Thou shalt renew the youth of all humanity.
Christ ever dwelleth in thee, oh, humanity. In thy breast
He lives, He is of thy lot a guest. His blood is thine, His
body is thy body. To thee it shall befall what did befall to
Him. All thy vicissitudes He carried in his flesh. To thee He
manifested all thy hopes. Whence art thou born? From a
pure virgin womb, because from God's own thought in godly
likeness. Whither dost thou go? To thy Father's city. By
what road must thou pass? Through pain and toil. And when
Christ on the summit of Mount Thabor was wrapt around with
the eternal dawn, seest thou not what that sign to thee fore-
telleth? Before thy earthly lot shall be in full accomplished,
thou too, oh, human race, shalt be transfigured. Thou shalt
leave at the foot of the dark mountains all that deceives and
all that is of sorrow: and thou shalt take spiritual knowledge
with thee, and the eternal, unending love of hearts. And in the
strength of these two hallowed powers like Christ shalt thou
ascend to globes of light. All sin shall from thy brow be wiped
away; as lightly moving wings thy members be. Thy hands
shalt thou stretch forth to the white air, and in it thou shalt
poise--as air thyself.
The following Psalm, the Psalm of Hope, plays on
a different note to that of the four other Psalms. It
is a cry of triumphant gladness. In his Life-giving
Truths Kamienski had called upon a new poet of hope
to appear. "Arise, singer of the future! We await thee
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? The Psalms of the Future 259
with undeceived hope, for thou must show thyself, for
the life-givingstrengthof Poland shall bring thee forth1. "
Elegies and lamentations were according to him to be
no more heard. Krasinski took up the challenge, and
he begins and ends his Psalm of Hope with the words:
Long enough, long enough, has the grief of poets rung upon
the strings. Now is it time to strike on a second string, on the
steel of deed.
For once sorrow is absent from this one of Kra-
sinski's poems. He sees close at hand the advent of the
Paraclete that shall restore a corrupted world and right
all wrong.
I say unto you He is not far, He, the Comforter promised
ages since. Nor thrones nor crowns shall be the first to see
Thee in the heavens. But the innocent martyr shall, oh, Spirit,
see Thee. Nor schemes of merchants nor the executioner's
hand can prevail against the truth. Oh, come quicker, spring
of the world! Oh, come quicker, God the Spirit! Surely, like
Christ caught to heaven, we shall ascend to the paradise of
love. Surely we are rising ever higher through the ages to the
final resurrection. From the spring unto the spring, ever to
the spring, the heavenly flower which is our soul is growing,
we all are ever growing unto Thee.
Then shall the eternal Gospel, reiterates the poet,
reign over the earth when, after long suffering, it
reaches its rest.
Farewell, earth, with pain and anguish! A new Jerusalem
glitters on the vale of the old earth. Long the road, the toil
was heavy, flowed a sea of blood and tears, but the angelic age
draws near. 7
Poland, Poland, thy grave was only the cradle of the new
dawn, only one little moment in the eternity where was con-
ceived the divine day.
Let us praise the Lord Who comes. Cast ye palms and
cast ye psalms--flowers below and songs on high. Oh, cast
1 H. Kamienski, Life-giving Truths for the Polish Nation. .
17--2
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? 260 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
songs and cast ye flowers! Lo, He comes! The Lord is
coming, sad no more as in past ages, freed from thorns and
nails and wounds, now transfigured--from heaven's high sum-
mit, from beyond the starry walls of the all-world, as the
horizon of all-blue, flows He to us--flows the Lord.
Oh, drink ye with your souls that heavenly blue, and all
shall grow forth as its blue around you. Though they torture
you and tempt you, in my hope you shall believe. Fear ye not
because to-day vileness ruleth everywhere. From your faith
shall be your will, from your will shall be your deed.
And the Psalm ends with the same summons to
the "steel of deed," with which Krasinski began it.
It will be noticed in this Psalm, and even more
in those which succeed it, that whatever the great future
Krasinski promises to his country he never fails
to insist that it can only be realized under the condition
of individual and national purity. When his country-
men accept his belief in Poland's resurrection and high
calling, then let them put their will to the task of its
fulfilment, and from that will shall arise the saving
deed. Hence only the most superficial reader of the
Anonymous Poet could characterize his teaching as
passive, or as too mystical to be taken as more than
a beautiful dream. It has all the exactions of spiritual
combat. The goal shines on the far horizon, radiant
and alluring: but it is practical action of the most in-
exorable nature that shall attain it. Having thus laid
his foundations Krasinski reaches his Psalm of Love.
The Psalm of Love occupies a place peculiar to
itself in the work of Krasinski: not only because it is
one of the greatest of his poems, but by reason of the
tragic circumstances that inspired it and the even
greater tragedy of its failure. Count Tarnowski likens
it to the patriotic outbursts of the splendid orators of
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? The Psalms of the Future 261
Greece and Rome pleading for their nation in a great
national peril, and pleading in vain1. Although the
Psalm is among the most episodical of Krasinski's
poems it is as strong a universal message as anything
he ever wrote. To the watchword of terrorism flung
forth by a brother-Pole the Anonymous Poet opposes
the watchword of love2. The Psalm of Love is a plea
to spurn evil means for a right end, to abjure the
weapons of a criminal violence, to remember that love
is the one saving force.
With the horror in his mind of what the projected
revolution would in its train bring upon his nation,
Krasinski entreats his countrymen to shun a fratricidal
slaughter. Let their weapons be turned against a
common enemy.
The guillotine and plunder are the
resource of the spirit in its infancy, rage the language
of children. These things are the liberty, not of man,
but of the brute beast.
It is time for the scales to fall from our eyes, time to take
to ourselves the toil of angels, time to cast off all stain and by
that very deed to destroy slavery. Destruction is not deed.
The only godlike truth, productive of deed, is transfiguration
through love.
Returning to the point at issue Krasinski points
to the
-
Polish people with the Polish nobles, as two choirs and but
one song. From that marriage but one spirit, the mighty
Polish nation, one will, one deed. Oh! salvation is only there.
The poet, who saw with horror before his mental
vision the white robe of his nation polluted by un-
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 262 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
worthy deeds on the part of her sons, then bids them
know that:
Who shall first lift his hand to shake the snow from off that
vesture, who changeth pain to crime, who forges fetters into
the assassin's knife and not into the sword, cursed is he.
When geniuses descend into this world they lead their
cause by another road. No men by murder and the rack have
been dictator for the ages. Rather they live in peril, rather
they perish in the end themselves: but their victory lasts for
ever. Each bloody name in history was borne by a worthless
soul. Only the weak soul chooses butchery, whether his name
be Robespierre or Marius.
Krasinski then utters an eloquent apologia for his
own order. Who, he asks, immolated themselves in
continual sacrifice on the altars of their country? Who,
with Poland in their hearts and sword in hand, fell in
battle, or were carried away to Siberia? And who, he
asks, could you find without fault? "Only He Who
was God and man in one. But from the sinner another
man shall soar through suffering, changed as the
phoenix. " He points to sea and land, to the Spanish
sierras where the Polish legions won immortal ? glory
--Krasinski's father had there headed their most
famous charge--to the fields of France, where the
soldier-nobles of Poland "have sown the seed of future
Poland, the godlike grain--their own blood. And of
; that blood you are the sons. "
The high ideal of those appointed to lead their
fellow-men is:
to shed forth the spirit on millions, to give forth bread to
every body, thoughts from heaven to every soul, to thrust none
down into the depths, but by the uplifting of others to advance
to ever higher spheres. . . Say, oh, white-winged unstained eagle,
whence is the swarm of the black thoughts [that will slay the
pure ideal of Poland]? They grow where there are chains.
Ah! bondage distilleth poison. Nought is Siberia, nought
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? The Psalms of the Future 263
the knout, but the corrupted spirit of a nation, that only is the
pain of pains.
Eternally the usurper stands before all eyes, the tempter
already in that he standeth there to say that God is not. He
dissolves conscience by the load of pain. He teaches little
children to believe in murder as in glory. Maidens shall take
daggers in their hands like roses. The sister shall say:
"Brother, take them, for butchery is our salvation. " Our country
shall be not heaven, but hell.
"Oh, my holy one," cries the devout lover of Poland in an
anguish of foreboding, "abjure these delusions! They are the
nightmares of an evil moment. Thou shalt not rid thee of thy
ancient faith that he only shall cut through his bonds who is
anointed with the sign of virtue, that to be a Pole upon this
earth is to live nobly and to God. "
But the powers of evil are thronging close on every
side.
Oh, my Poland! Holy Poland! Thou standest on the
threshold of thy victory. This is the last term of thy pain. Let
it be only manifest that thou art the eternal foe of evil. Then
shall the bonds of death be shattered, and thou shalt be caught
up to heaven, because even until death thou wert with God.
When the last moment brings death's crisis into life,
then is the terrible battle. Sobs of despair, wailings of lament,
are moaned by dying lips--oh, my God! In the strength of
thy suffering overcome that moment, conquer that pain. And
thou shalt rise again, and thou shalt rise the queen of the
Slavonian plains.
Let men gaze into thy face with love as though upon the
spring. Be thou the mistress who straightens the crooked ways
of the world, the herald of all love. Efface all sin. Dry all
tears. Rule the world of souls, disdain the rule of flesh. From
sheep-like men nations do thou create.
But again all this is conditional; and the refrain of
the closing stanzas of the poem must needs be the cry
of warning: "Cast away your murderous weapons! "
When the harvest is ripe and the word thunders forth,
then and only then: "forward in the name of God.
Take your swords, your flails, your scythes," cries the
poet with the vision of Kosciuszko's peasant bands
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? 264 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
before his eyes. The holy rising of class, fighting side
by side' for the liberation of their country, shall break
down prison and fortress, and then of a surety: "God
will not turn away His face. "
Thus ends the Psalm of Love, which lives in Polish
history as a noble piece of pleading, justified too late
by the catastrophe that it had striven to avert.
Krasinski spent the winter and spring of 1846 with
his wife and infant son in a villa at Nice. Delphina
Potocka was also at Nice in her own villa. Krasinski,
as we learn from his correspondence with his friends,
was already suffering acutely from the goad of his
conscience in this false position, when the blow of 1846
fell upon him. The February of that year saw the
/ terrible uprising of the Galician peasantry. A general
insurrection had been projected through all Poland.
We have seen that one party of young Poles intended
to work it on social lines, and in particular to arm the
peasants. The Austrian government, having discovered
what was going forward, seized the opportunity to carry
into effect what its policy in Galicia had been stealthily
aiming at: the enfeebling of Poland by deliberately
setting one class against another. It sent its agents
among the ignorant Polish peasants, and succeeded in
persuading a certain number of them that the Polish
landowners were their deadly enemies who must be
exterminated. Deluded by these secret propagandists,
bribed by the Austrian government that paid so much
on the head of every Polish noble, maddened by the
drink with which the same government incited them to
the deed, the peasants, in two provinces, for the
Austrian machinations were not wholly successful,
attacked the manor houses. Scenes of appalling
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? The Psalms of the Future 265
horror followed, in which thousands of Polish nobles
were butchered.
This triumph of the Metternichian policy is one of
the most painful pages in modern Polish history.
"Are there words,"wrote Krasinski to Matachowski,
*' in any human tongue with which to express the suffering
of this moment? . . . This world and its each day bears
for us the name of hell1. " Krasinski had interpreted
the fate of the nation by the promise of a great spiritual
leadership only to be gained by purity and sacrifice;
hence the Galician massacres were the visible triumph of
the powers of darkness thrusting an adored country into
the pit of infamy from the only road that could save her.
It seemed as though the catastrophe that had befallen
his nation was to cost Krasinski his life. For the next
two years he lived in a condition of such physical
collapse that those who watched over him were in
constant expectation of his death. He never recovered
the effect of this national disaster. At the age of thirty-
four he became prematurely aged. From 1846 to the
year of his death, 1859, his was uninterrupted bodily
suffering.
But to him who before the massacres had written:
We shall sink into chaos, our bodies may die in tortures as
our souls have died even before them: but our Idea is all
powerful like God, for like God it is truth and love, and shall
be victorious over our corpses2:
to him it was impossible to fall into despair more than
momentary. However great the anguish that had in-
vaded his soul the hope which he had won at the cost of
pangs of travail did not die. His Idea was to be proved
by the test of fire.
1 Letters to Matachowski. Nice, March 16, 18, 1846.
2 Ibid. Nice, Jan. 9, 1846.
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? 266 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I go as a madman since I read in all the papers
what has happened": were his first words to Gaszynski
after the news had reached Nice.
About myself I know that I shall die, but I know also that
the idea shall conquer. It conquers by defeats. That which
has to conquer for all ages must suffer before the day of
triumph, must be formed by pain, be trained by martyrdom1.
And later to Matachowski:
See if the lot of Christ is not repeated to the last letter
under the figure of the history of the nation. Fearful that
moment, that "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? " We to-
day are in that like position. . . He only felt Himself forsaken
in the last moment of death. And those who are to rise again
from the dead must pass through this. But before the Resur-
rection morning how many hearts shall break. Mine first of
all8.
"I am sinking under the burden of life"--to Gas-
zynski--"where all is like to death with this one
difference that there is not the rest of death3. " "I am
exiled from my hopes," he says in one dark moment,
when the very faith by which he had lived seemed rent
from him. "I am wandering and fugitive. Where
should I go? " he adds, in reference to his plans for the
immediate future. "Nothing lures me anywhere. The
world is to me a desert where here and there lie
scattered the dead bodies of the Galician nobles4. " So
run the letters of one borne down under the extremity
of mental agony; but even" now he can still tell
Gaszynski that: "all is lost except faith, but with faith
all can be regained. "
What cast any stain upon the moral integrity of
his nation was far more hideous in Krasinski's eyes
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Nice, March I, 1846.
2 Letters to Matachowski. Nice, March 30, 1846.
3 Letters to Gaszynski. Nice, May 5, 1846.
4 Ibid. Nice, May 7, 1846.
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? The Psalms of the Future 267
than all exterior persecution. When in the autumn of
the year Austria, in flagrant violation of the Treaty of
Vienna, annexed Cracow, the last remaining vestige
of Poland's independence, great as was Krasinski's
patriotic indignation, he wrote the following words on
the subject to his friends, the philosopher, Bronistaw
Trentowski, and Stanislaw Kozmian:
When we last embraced each other there was still a span
of Polish earth as though independent on the map of Europe.
To-day you will find none. This is the beginning of the end,
this is the crisis. The last evil must indeed be the last. I am
profoundly convinced that if we do not with our own hands
give the finishing stroke to ourselves to the glorification of our
enemies, our political resurrection from the dead shall begin
from the day of Cracow's death. There was never a nation in
such sublime circumstances, in such favourable conditions,
who was so near, from the cross on which she hangs, to the
heaven whither she must ascend. No human history has till
now presented, at any period of the development of history,
such a concurrence of events facilitating the transition from
death to life and triumph1.
That last span of earth torn from us, that fourth partition,
has more than anything else advanced our cause. Every
wound inflicted on something holy and good becomes a far
deeper wound, by the reflection of the Divine Justice that
rules history, on him who inflicted it. Earlier or later--the
question is only what hour--from this crime that has been
effected absolutely shall come forth our resurrection, or rather
the external circumstance which will permit us to emerge from
the grave, for our true resurrection is not outside us but
within us2.
The recipient of the second passage, Stanislaw
Kozmian, had been Krasinski's friend in boyhood.
The Rising of 1830 parted them till the year 1843 when,
to the joy of both, they met in Rome, and renewed a
1 Letters, Vol. III. To Bronislaw Trentowski. Aix-en-Provence,
Dec. 16, 1846.
2 Letters from Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Kozmian. Nice, Dec.
18, 1846.
? ? 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.