Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/27

 Rh a milder climate, and he spent the winter in Italy. Returning again to Switzerland, he met there with Mickiewicz, and they made together the tour of that romantic country. The daily association with that far-famed poet kindled the slumbering sparks of creative genius in the soul of Sigismund.

The close of the year 1830 found him in Italy, where he received the distressing intelligence of the disastrous events occurring in Warsaw. They made a profound impression on the enthusiastic and patriotic young Pole, but he was thoroughly unable to follow the dictates of his heart. His moral strength would have been sufficient to have supported him through the conflict then so wildly raging in his breast, but he was forced to succumb to physical weakness: the consequent struggle brought upon him an illness which chained him to his bed during a whole year. He has often declared that this was the most painful period of his existence, and a state of bodily suffering began in it which was to last as long as life endured.

At the urgent request of his father he returned to Warsaw in 1832. Thence he went to St. Petersburg, where the Emperor offered him such position in the service of the state as he should deem most congenial with his tastes and wishes. He, however, begged permission to continue his travels, and as the court physician declared the severity of the climate would prove disastrous to health so delicate, and his eyesight grew every day weaker and weaker, it was decided that he should at once repair to one of the foreign watering-places. His stay in St. Petersburg having lasted all winter, gave him an opportunity to become thoroughly acquainted with Count Branicki, in whose house he first saw the maiden whom Heaven had destined to be the partner of his life.

It was about this date that Priessnitz, of water-cure fame, began to be celebrated, and Sigismund, with other Poles, hastened to Gräfenberg to try that mode of cure. He found it, to a limited extent, beneficial, and it enabled him to pass the winters of 1833 and 1834 with some degree of comfort in Vienna. It was then and there he wrote the tale "Agai-Chan," in which there is a sketch of the