Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/64

58 happy—to see a great and noble grief supported with such true and quiet dignity. And that which seems to us to merit still higher esteem is the great moral vigor which the Anonymous Poet displays in his work of expiation, the unflinching integrity, the firm tread of a conscience ever bearing so heavy a burden. It is the peculiarity, as well as the dangerous shoal of all efforts at rehabilitation, to exceed due measure, to fall into excess; and to whom would the world have more readily pardoned the adoption of extreme passions and sublimated ideas, of ultra and excited patriotism, than to this son, the labor of whose life it was to cause his father's name to be forgotten, and who, to effect that end, had taken up the arms of poetry,—that is to say, even the weapons of passion and exaltation? He was, however, strong enough to resist this dangerous temptation, and he who bore in his heart such a touching necessity to win the favor of the public, has almost constantly braved it in its inclinations and caprices! He was, without doubt, faithful to the national sentiment, but refused to submit to its entrancements of the hour; on the contrary, he boldly stemmed the current of whatsoever he believed wrong or injudicious, even at the risk of drawing upon himself an unpopularity which would have been to him doubly grievous. Ah! let us for one moment consider the grandeur, virtue, and merit of such courage in the painful position he occupied. His first literary effort was distinguished by a defiance boldly thrown at the humanitarian and socialistic systems, then so much in vogue in his own country; and at a later date, he armed himself with all his poetic lightning to combat a democratic propaganda, of which he clearly saw the fatal consequences, but which had at that time subjugated almost all minds. Not only did he wound his nation in its transitory political predilections; he was not afraid to strike it in its sentiments the most profound, the most deeply rooted in its heart. As an example of this, he preached the utter powerlessness of vengeance, of hate, to a subjugated people, chafing under oppression, gnawed by despair, proclaimed dead, and who saw in this ever-vivid vengeance, this persistent hate, the ever-living proof of its own vitality. He sung to them the majesty of a