Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/30

 24 as his residence for the winter, where his wife soon joined him. The disease of his eyes had so increased as to incapacitate him for all literary labor. The following summer he spent at Baden; the following winter in Rome. He took great interest in the excavations and disinterments then being made in the Appian Way, finding in them the subject of a masterly poem dedicated to his wife, which has never as yet been published. He went also again to Naples, and was a frequent guest in the Palace of the Grand Duchess, Stephanie von Baden, who took as great pleasure in the society of the Polish poet as she had already taken in the perusal of such of his works as she could obtain in French. He then went to the Rhine, but was ordered by the Government to return to Poland, where he arrived with his family late in the autumn of 1852, and remained there until the close of the next summer. But as his residence in that climate would have been certain death to him, he again applied for permission to go abroad. Having obtained it, he went to Boppard, on the Rhine, to try for the second time the water-cure, but he derived no benefit therefrom. His sons remained in Warsaw with their grandfather, while he, tortured by continual suffering, remained upon the Rhine. His wife, after having given birth to a daughter, followed him to Heidelberg,—the only place abroad in which the Russian Government would allow him to remain for any length of time. Dreadfully emaciated, he had become so weak that, with tottering steps, he was only able to walk for a few moments during the day under the shadow of the trees in front of his dwelling, and could only Avrite with his pencil. In this pitiable condition, the command was again issued for his immediate return to Poland! His wife instantly returned to Warsaw, to endeavor to have the order canceled. After the most untiring efforts she obtained its recall, but with the express understanding that permission to remain abroad was granted for the last time. Return was certain death, but as Russia knouts her own poets, she could scarcely be expected to attach any importance to the prolongation of the life of the noble Pole.

The death of the stern Nicholas, in 1855, so for alleviated the position of Krasinski that his residence abroad was