Page:A history of Bohemian literature.pdf/399

382 "Come here and find (in heaven and hell) an example in the good and a warning in the evil. Learn above all to love your country. "May these words resound from your summits, O Carpathians, to the Černa Hora (Montenegro), from the Giant Mountains to the Ural: 'Hell for traitors, heaven for faithful Slavs!'"

Kollar's merit as a writer depends mainly on the "Daughter of Sláva," though he was a copious writer of prose as well as poetry. A small German pamphlet by Kollar entitled, Ueber die literarische Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der Slavischen Nation ("On the Literary Solidarity of the various Branches of the Slav Nation"), which appeared in 1837, caused great sensation, and for a time acquired even political importance. In Bohemian Kollar wrote, besides his Slávy Dcera, an account of his travels in Germany and Italy and several archæological works. Of these, the Staroitalia Slavjanská ("Slavic Ancient Italy"), written in the last year of Kollar's life, and dedicated to the Emperor Francis Joseph, is the largest. The author endeavoured, on the slightest evidence and by means of the most fantastical suppositions, to prove that a large part of the population of Italy—particularly in the north—is of Slav origin. Kollar is here constantly carried away by his exuberant imagination, and the book has no scientific value. It is, indeed, scarcely an exaggeration to call it a tissue of absurdities. Kollar's recently published correspondence with Jungmann, Šafařik, Palacký, and others has great interest.

While Kollar devoted to the revival of the Bohemian language and literature his enthusiastic eloquence and poetic talents, Šafařik employed for the same purpose