Page:Bohemian poems, ancient and modern (Lyra czecho-slovanska).djvu/34

xxx the above-quoted sentiments were enunciated by Tyl in Bohemia, a great and important change has taken place. While the German was wasting his strength and blood upon a phantom, the clear-sighted Slavonian was struggling, for his language, his literature, and his civil rights. Nor is he any longer subject to the former oppression; in the school and in the university he is now at liberty to receive his education and to display his proficiency through the medium of his own native language; his cause can now be pleaded, his rights enforced in the law-courts in his own beloved mother-tongue.

That a road is thus opened for the formation of a considerable literature is evident; the Bohemians are well aware of their opportunity, and are exerting themselves to the uttermost, both in the republication of ancient, and the composition of modern works, especially through the society called the Matice Czeská. What the end of these things will be, what influence will be exercised upon human, and especially upon European, civilization by the Slavonians, is known for certain to God alone; my own belief is, that Bohemia is the point of