Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/44

 38 all that was false in their ideas, all that was culpable in their contemplated acts, dissuading them from their designs; and then, rising to a majestic grandeur of conception, he opened before them paths which would inevitably lead them to realize the highest ideal upon earth.

But the passions of men were already unloosed, and nothing could arrest them. They found even an apologist in a man of genius and a rival of our Poet, who replied to him in poetic tones—a mingling of biblical prophecy and zealous polemics—"that all progress must be bought by blood, and that God renewed the face of humanity as He did that of the earth, by a series of deluges!" The contest of the two poets retains its celebrity among the literary glories of Poland, and we will find its last echo in the final scene of "The Fragment," which was not published until after the death of the author.

The contest was still in progress, when the events themselves assumed the reply. Truly it was not Poland, but the all-powerful administration of M. Bach, which rose from the massacres in Galicia! Austrian domination triumphed materially and morally over its opponents, and seemed to realize the conditions which render a victory final. The ideas of the Anonymous Poet, slighted at a time when they would have insured success, were now confirmed in every conscience as a reproach or a regret. But the utter discouragement which pervaded all minds, joined to the conviction that repentance came too late, struck such regret with sterility. Alas! hours of like prostration occur in the history of most nations; hours of gloom and despair, when all that is still living lives only in the feeling of impotence and utter nothingness! Such terrible trials are inevitable in the course of time;—probations which decide upon the life or death of a people, as it shall triumph over its despair or abandon itself to torpor! . . . . The Anonymous Poet, always in the breach, felt it now his duty to react against this discouragement, and to use the moral authority he had gained through such tragical occurrences to waken the dormant energies of his compatriots. Under this conviction, he published the "Psalms of Grief and of Good Will," in which, through his ideal, he returns to hope,