Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/115



during his exile once exclaimed: "Oh, thou land, which, when we die, preserves so many reminiscences of us! Oh, thou beautiful land, our mother! When we say farewell to our friends, we have the hope of meeting them again in the next world, in heaven. But never, never again shall we see thy loved landscapes, thy linden avenues, thy villas, thy brooks and rivers, thy spring which was always young, none of all these memories. Can heaven really be so beautiful that it makes us forget all this, or does a river of Lethe flow before the gate of Paradise?"

In these words of a childlike believer, who hopes for a future meeting with his friends, but yet cannot expect a future sight of his fatherland there is a feeling, which, if we give it a little greater scope, embraces far more than these words. In fact how wonderful is this obstinate national contest of the Poles! They fight desperately for the preservation and development of their language and popular peculiarities, and suffer a thousand pangs for their sake. Every one of them knows that he must die, but he would have the consciousness that the language and the people will survive when he shall know no more of them. Even those among them who believe in another life do not imagine that in that other life they will speak Polish. And those who do not believe in a future life, who do not fear annihilation for themselves, fear it for the whole nation, every individual of which must die.

It is a similar feeling to that feeling of horror, which seizes most men when they hear for the first time that this earth is slowly cooling off, and that sometime in the far