Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/56

 50 to believe in the reality of the doom of that ghostly tribunal. It repeats the awful lessons of Holy Writ, and our conscience awakes to our own deficiencies, while the marrow freezes in our bones as we read.

Nor is the close of the drama less sublime. Because the was neither in the camp of Pancras nor in the Castle of the Count, IT appears in the clouds to confound them both.

After Pancras has conquered all that has opposed him—has triumphantly gloated over his Fourieristic schemes for the material well being of the race whom he has robbed of all higher faith—he grows agitated at the very name of God when it falls from the lips of his confidant, Leonard: the sound seems to awaken him to a consciousness that he is standing in a sea of blood, which he has himself shed; he feels that he has been nothing but an instrument of destruction, that he has done certain evil for a most uncertain good. All this rushes rapidly upon him, when, on the bosom of a crimson sunset cloud, he perceives a mystic symbol, unseen save by himself: "The extended arms are lightning flashes; the three nails shine like stars,"—his eyes die out as he gazes upon it,—he falls dead to the earth, crying, in the strange words spoken by the apostate Emperor Julian with his parting breath, Thus this grand and complex drama is really consecrated to the glory of the Galilean!

Nothing more intensely melancholy than this poem has ever been written. The author could only have been born in a country desolated for ages! Therefore this drama is eminently Polish. The grief is too bitter to express itself oratorically. Its hopeless perplexity of woe has also its root in the character and depth of the truths therein developed. The poet-hero aspires for the Future; it disappoints him;—he then grasps the dying Past, because, as he himself says, "God has enlightened his reason, but not warmed his heart." His thoughts and feelings cannot be brought into harmony. The tortures and agonies of struggling with pressing but insoluble questions are not manifested in artistic declamations, in highly-wrought phrases, nor in glowing rhetorical passages proper for citation. The Drama is as prosaic and bitter as life itself;