Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/63

Rh brilliant, and would at once have sought and published a rupture, which would have been everywhere welcomed with applause. But this unhappy son was neither a Coriolanus nor a Brutus; he was only a Christian! He received in utter simplicity the simple command of God: "Honor thy father and mother." He never believed he had the right to deny him who had given him life, nor even to sit in judgment upon his actions; but at the same time he felt himself as strongly the son of the nation,—he shared in all her agonies, and in all the hopes of his oppressed and murdered country. Thus placed by God between his father and his country, with sublime resignation he accepted the unceasing struggle without any possible issue, which two sentiments equally sacred were to wage forever in his soul. He lived almost always abroad, thus avoiding a contact more bitter than dangerous; without, however, ever being able to withdraw himself from the pitiless arms which forever weighed upon him and his. He once said to us: "My footsteps have almost always pressed a foreign soil. I have only heard from afar the groans of the victims; but I feel every where the hand of the executioner." Thus it was upon a foreign soil that he became a poet, but he only accepted this celestial gift from Heaven as a means of penitence on earth; and in giving such master-works to his suffering country, he forever renounced the reward so dear to poets—glory. He believed it to be his duty to expiate a fault not his own, by immolating the most legitimate and purest personal fame, and always pleaded for another by this persistent sacrifice of silence, or at most, by these brief and timid words, heartbreaking in their pathos for those who understand them: "O my Country, my mother thrice murdered! They who merit most thy tears, are perhaps they who merit not thy pardon!" Thus he knew all the torments of creative genius without ever tasting its raptures! Erostratus reversed, he passed his whole life in erecting a temple, that a name might be forever forgotten!

Certainly such a life has that in it which must touch the soul, and in a time when poets so often shock us by factitious griefs, and a parade of wounds upon which they enlarge at pleasure, one is consoled—we were about to say,