Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/59



events occurring in Poland since the commencement of the year 1861, stamped as they are with a character so remarkably original, and so difficult of comprehension in Western Europe, so skeptical with regard to all magnanimous political aspirations, have had among other results that of concentrating attention upon a writer who died about three years ago, and whose renown has been, as yet, almost confined within the limits of his own country. But such a fame can no longer be thus limited. The strange influence of the Anonymous Poet of Poland in the national movement which has broken out upon the banks of the Vistula, and the marvelous power, so clearly seen throughout the progress of the recent agitation, which his writings have exercised upon the spirit of his People, have been already noticed in this Review. What more astonishing spectacle could indeed be presented than the transmutation of ideal, nay, even mystical thought, into living, suffering, and palpable reality? A marvel truly in this age of utter practicality, is the moral and posthumous power exercised over a whole people by a solitary and contemplative genius, who, step by step, succeeded in impregnating an impassioned Nation with the most powerful, yet wholly abstract convictions, with a love of truths, the more difficult of comprehension as they were in a 53