Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/19

 Rh But why call up this terrible spectacle of a great Aryan Nation in her agony, with the prolonged death-rattle in her throat; why lift the shroud of anguish from entire generations, fathers, sons, daughters, infiints, all driven into dissolution by a barbaric and relentless foe, the ruin of schools and universities, the destruction of libraries, the deportation of students, the transplantation and consequent slaughter of thousands of innocent children, the forcible transportation of thirty thousand helpless inhabitants into the Caucasus, the desecration of maidens, the tortures of patriots, the knoutings of heroes, boys and matrons, and the persecution of the oldest form of Christian faith? Because the victim is not dead, and there is vast moral power in the force of public opinion. Because the American mission is the actualization everywhere of not merely nominal, but real freedom, founded upon justice and eternal truth. But chiefly it is done in the present relation, because it is our ardent desire that the Polish poet should be understood in all his sublime patriotism by American readers, and to show that his deepest hues are not so dark as the truth they depict; because, for full sympathy with his original conceptions, we must recognize his own sad stand-point, and the melancholy position of the country he so earnestly loved. For poet and people hold positions entirely exceptional in the history of the world,

Poles and exiles! it is with no light feeling of selfdistrust that the daughter of a distant land has ventured to lay her daring hands upon the master-works of your poet, patriot, and statesman. She would fain have called the high poets of her country to the task of transmuting the thoughts of the Polish Dante into fitting English; but none seemed ready to begin the work. Wreathing their lyres with their own immortal flowers, singing their songs of freedom for the emancipation, cultivation, and delight of humanity,—some of them perchance momentarily charmed by the mystic might of Russia,—none were prepared to burn the torch of their own genius to illume the spiritual and majestic features of your illustrious dead. Feeble as may be the fire of this torch as now borne, sway and flicker as it may in the uncertain hands, may its light yet be strong enough to manifest something of the