Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/19

 (Satiristic Romances), of which sixteen thousand copies were sold within one year, exhibit a series of model characters of every kind. The faults and defects of human society are palpably shown by the reader’s comparing the heroes of these stories with the average persons of cold reality. Among other characters of this gallery we find a judge who fines a poor widow for damage done by her geese to the crop of a wealthy lord. People detest him; but when the woman is about to leave the court-room, the judge gives her a ten-florin bill to pay the fine. People extol him now; his honesty and liberality are soon made known throughout the land, and in a short time the judge’s house begins to be daily besieged by armies of beggars. Scientific problems of all kinds are solved in the so-called ‘Romanettoes.’ The hero of ‘The Ethiopian Lily’ is a young pharmaceutist, who tries to find out a medicine that would prolong life and take away all the pain that dying persons suffer. By a curious association of thoughts he is led to ascribe to the Ethiopian lily an extraordinary healing power, but learns afterwards that his supposition was false. This romanetto shows that people whose opinions always agree with those of the mass are the happiest, while those who are courageous enough to have opinions of their own live poor and dissatisfied. In ‘Newtonův mozek’ (Newton’s Brain) a friend of the author secures the brain of the great astronomer from a British museum; with its aid he accomplishes wonderful things, among others he constructs a flying-machine whose velocity exceeds that of light; thus pursuing the rays of the sun he succeeds in catching pictures of the past. This, of course, is finally found to have been a dream. ‘Ukřižovaná’ (The Crucified Virgin) tells of a young soldier of fertile imagination who is haunted to death by the vision of a crucified bearded maiden. Having been wounded in battle, he is carried to a church which was used as a hospital. There he sees that vision again and dies of the horror. It was in the same church where he had seen this vision as a boy while hidden there during a revolution. He deemed it to be a delusion, though in fact he saw a real picture of a crucified bearded virgin, a Russian saint. His nerves were exceedingly irritable, and so his seeing the vision again produced a fatal excitement. The psychological