Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/66

60 ; every glorious memorial of the past destroyed or severely punished; a police of spies forever upon the watch to entrap the unwary; menace and the most fearful punishments suspended over every Polish head; in a word, repose nowhere, and death everywhere! In such a state of affairs, the moral life, which is, whatever may be said, the national life, finds its only refuge in Religion and in Poetry.

This is not the time to appreciate aright the part held by religion in this whirl of torment; but it may be said without exaggeration that Poetry divides the influence over souls with religion, if with some natures it does not even monopolize it. Works of imagination do not constitute in Poland, as in more happy lands, the mere delight of the intellect; they are not read in saloons, nor discussed in freedom and with eager play of thought. Imported secretly by the Jews, they are bought literally at their weight in gold; and such poems are devoured in mystery, often at midnight, in the midst of friends long and fully tried, and who are all sworn to keep the secret. The doors are bolted, the shutters barred, and one of the Faithful is always placed in the street to give the alarm should the enemy approach; for the discovery would be Siberia or death! After such readings have been again and again repeated, feverish and palpitating as they are rendered by the attendant precautions and risks, the pages of the poem are given to the flames, but the verses remain indelibly graven upon the excited memory. Under such circumstances do our unfortunate youths hear the burning words of our poets, which alone speak to them of country, liberty, hope, virtue, and combat. It is often only through the "Sir Thaddeus" and "The Ancestors" of Mickiewicz that the greater part of our young men and maidens may learn anything of the history of their own times. A Polish writer once made the profoundly true remark, that history could only point to two nations which had received an education exclusively poetic: Greece in ancient times, and the Poland of the nineteenth century. Is such an education harmless, irreproachable? Is it devoid of the greatest dangers both for the man and the citizen? We are far from