Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/122

98 Yea and amen!

Into sleep, the deep sleep of calmness and release.

And with this evening hymn of the soul, which is scourged to death by vital anguish and vital torment, ends not only this mazurek; we find it again everywhere—in the impromptus, the preludes, and, wonderfully beautiful in the mazurek in F flat minor.

It is in the mazurek that Chopin has reproduced not only the tone of his nation, but, at the same time, the tone of his own soul. He himself designated this primordial tone by the untranslatable word "Żal"; a feeling of grief and melancholy, united with the past memory of things on which the heart dotes and which are no more; an unappeasable, perpetual yearning which gnaws at the soul, a perpetual enforced memory of something unattainable, a hopeless dreaming of a distant home which shall never again be seen, of people, who never again will be met, a brooding over sunken splendour, over vanished beauty of happiness and joy which gladdened life in bygone days.

It is as though Chopin had dispatched his astral body from abroad into his own country, and now hearkened intently in sorrowful yearning for the secret tidings from afar.