Page:Satanella (1932).pdf/20

 Or, we saw him standing on the rostrum before his professorial pulpit, and with closed eyes—while only the few gas-burners in the dimly lighted lecture room were humming their monotonous melody—reciting in a high pitched voice a few scattered verses of his masterful translations. With what anxiety we listened, always eager to hear more and more from him, whom a French contemporary not inaptly chose to label, "the Czech Victor Hugo!"

And then, as members of the academic fencing club, we stood around his coffin, a silent, stolid guard in the monumental Pantheon hall of the National Museum. And, when at last, just before dusk of a gorgeous summer evening, his body was laid to rest in "Slavin," the renowned burial ground of Vysehrad (the Czech Westminster Abbey), we all felt that in the passing of Vrchlicky Czech literature lost its greatest poet and inspirator.

In 1903, there appeared in Pelcl's "Rozhledy," an influential Prague magazine, an inflammatory article entitled "A Paper Pyramid," containing a condemnation of Vrchlicky's achievements. We, his ardent students, were thoroughly convinced that a flagrant injustice had been inflicted upon the prince of the Czech poets whose fiftieth birthday was then being observed throughout the nation with unexampled solemnity.

It is true, indeed, that there never was a poet more productive than Vrchlicky. As one of his more recent critics sets out, Vrchlicky wrote such a mass of verse, original and translated, besides a large quantity of prose, that the literary output of his life was greater in volume than that of any other of the world's leading writers excepting Lope de Vega.