Page:A history of Bohemian literature.pdf/389

372 clusively, or even principally, occupied young Kollar while at Jena. An event during his stay at Jena influenced his whole life, and became the origin of the only one of his works that will live. He became passionately attached to Mina (or Wilhelmina) Schmidt, the daughter of a Protestant clergyman who lived in a village near Jena. How the German country girl was by Kollar transformed into the Daughter of Sláva is one of the curiosities of literature. Kollar's suit for Mina Schmidt was for the present unsuccessful. Frau Schmidt declared that she would never allow her daughter to live in a "savage country," as she termed Hungary; and it was to that country that Kollar's ecclesiastical career obliged him to return. Kollar afterwards became minister to the Protestant Church at Pest, and continued there up to the year 1849. He corresponded with Mina for some time after his departure from Jena, but news—incorrect, as it afterwards turned out—was brought from Germany announcing Mina's death. The news proved untrue, and fifteen years after Kollar's departure from Jena, and some years after he had raised Mina to the Slav heaven, she became his wife. Kollar's life, like that of all the Bohemian patriots, was a very laborious and painful one. His letters contain constant complaints of the incessant persecutions on the part of the Hungarian Government which his Slav sympathies brought on him. A plot on the part of Hungarians to murder Kollar was even discovered. Kollar several times appealed, and appealed successfully, to the Emperor Francis I. for protection. Kollar's ideas of Slavic solidarity also resulted mainly in disappointment. The separation of the Slavs on the whole continued as before, and even Kollar's own language, the Bohemian, was abandoned