Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/32

 26 unable to hasten to the dying bed, and was forced to commit this tender duty to his wife, who fulfilled it so efficiently that she arrrivedarrived [sic] in time to close the dying eyes of Count Vincent Krasinski. The news of this death fearfully shattered the sinking frame of Sigismund; he withdrew from society, and was scarcely to be seen even by his most intimate friends. He tried to soothe his aching heart by preparing a sketch of his father's life for the Italian sculptor who was to execute the monument of General Krasinski, but was only able to bring it down to 1827.

Meanwhile, he was constantly urged by his friends, who saw how rapidly he was declining, to seek a milder clime; but he would not listen to their entreaties, and remained in Paris. He watched the course of political events with intense interest, and his soul was filled with divinations of important and widely-spread changes yet to be. His illness now suddenly assumed a form so marked that he at last became alarmed, and recalled to Paris his wife, who, at his request, had remained in Warsaw to attend to the inheritance left him by his father. His three physicians agreed in the opinion that his days were numbered, and his wife saw on her return that there was no hope for the husband so dearly loved.

The seal of death was indeed already upon him, and, after a painful struggle, lasting through ten entire days, his pure and immortal soul left his racked and suffering body during the night of the 23d to the 24th of February, 1859.

The coffin containing his mortal remains was placed temporarily in the Church of the Madeleine; but later, accompanied by Count Zamoyiski, it was taken to Poland, and at Opingora, the ancestral seat of the Krasinskis, his body found its final resting-place, surrounded by illustrious ancestors.

And this is all our author, who evidently loved the subject of his biography, ventures to tell us of the internal life of the man, of the exhausting conflict between filial veneration and duty and intense and glowing patriotism, forever surging through the soul of the sublime Poet.