Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/116

92 needed to do nothing else but with lavish hands to scatter teeming treasures about him,—treasures which the soul of the nation had hoarded in his soul for centuries.

And Chopin died neither too early nor too late; in this brief individual life the entire folk-soul was enabled to give itself complete utterance in richer measure than almost any other. Indeed, there is hardly another artist, the events of whose life are of so little interest as in the case of Chopin. He is revelation and symbol. And the centre of equilibrium around which every happening in his soul oscillates, that is the land which bore him, the land with its sadness and its quiet melancholy rapture, its sombre tragicness and its blood-red destiny, the land, an isle yearned for with the greater anguish, as it slipped away in ever remoter perspectives and began to vanish from the gaze, the promised land upon which all yearning and striving centred, and which might never again be viewed with one's own eyes—the land, not as an ordinary reality, but rather as a Platonic anamnesis; in a distant memory which was coloured with a deeper flush, the greater the longing for it which set the heart of the gazer aquiver.

Ever again, throughout his immortal work, is the flaming vision of that land, which in the words of the poet Ujejski, "by day attires itself in kingly splendour and in the night oozes with