Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/129

Rh human effort of will they drag themselves from the ground afresh, and afresh they make an onslaught upon the gates of the lost paradise; but it endures not for long; with a gruesome shriek of pain this desperate fit of wrath ebbs away.

And from afar there comes a sound like the confused din of battle,—muffled roaring of cannon, the clatter of fire-arms, the rumble of the earth beneath the hoofs of raging horses,—prayers for the dying can be heard, beseeching pleas to the guider of battles, the chaos and the anguish and the wrath of the fight move farther and farther away; then suddenly, from the savage brawling of battle, the crazed raging of the fight, the perishing prayers, the mad pleas of dying heroes for release by death, like a holy, mystic rose, there blossoms a mysterious mazurek, in which the genius of Chopin has revealed the whole sorely profound death-poetry of his nation with incredible creative strength.

From all the tender, naive and yet so infinitely subtle songs of the Polish lancers, the disconsolate folk-songs after the collapse of the revolution of 1831, from all the scantily-tuned but all the more richly laden chants of many a long since forgotten Tyrtaeus, who with the primordial tone of the Polish soul, the mazurek,