a wholesome
ideal of life such as animated the finest spirits of Poland in the years
of its greatest glory, a spirit both humanistic and universally human.

G. R. NOYES.

TO URSULA KOCHANOWSKI

A CHARMING, MERRY, GIFTED CHILD, WHO, AFTER SHOWING GREAT PROMISE OF ALL
MAIDENLY VIRTUES AND TALENTS, SUDDENLY, PREMATURELY, IN HER UNRIPE
YEARS, TO THE GREAT AND UNBEARABLE GRIEF OF HER PARENTS, DEPARTED HENCE.

WRITTEN WITH TEARS FOR HIS BELOVED LITTLE GIRL BY JAN KOCHANOWSKI, HER
HAPLESS FATHER.

THOU ART NO MORE, MY URSULA.

_Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
Juppiter auctiferas lustravit lumine terras._

LAMENT I

Come, Heraclitus and Simonides,
Come with your weeping and sad elegies:
Ye griefs and sorrows, come from all the lands
Wherein ye sigh and wail and wring your hands:
Gather ye here within my house today
And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May
Ungodly Death hath ta'en to his estate,
Leaving me on a sudden desolate.
'Tis so a serpent glides on some shy nest
And, of the tiny nightingales possessed,
Doth glut its throat, though, frenzied with her fear,
The mother bird doth beat and twitter near
And strike the monster, till it turns and gapes
To swallow her, and she but just escapes.
"'Tis vain to weep," my friends perchance will say.
Dear God, is aught in life not vain, then? Nay,
Seek to lie soft, yet thorns will prickly be:
The life of man is naught but vanity.
Ah, which were better, then--to seek relief
In tears, or sternly strive to conquer grief?

LAMENT II

If I had ever thought to write in praise
Of little children and their simple ways,
Far rather had I fashioned cradle verse
To rock to slumber, or the songs a nurse
Might croon above the baby on her breast.
Setting her charge's short-lived woes at rest.
For much more useful are such trifling tasks
Than that which sad misfortune this day asks:
To weep o'er thy deaf grave, dear maiden mine.
And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine.
But now I have no choice of subject: then
I shunned a theme scarce fitting riper men,
And now disaster drives me on by force
To songs unheeded by the great concourse
Of mortals. Verses that I would not sing
The living, to the dead I needs must bring.
Yet though I dry the marrow from my bones,
Weeping another's death, my grief atones
No whit. All forms of human doom
Arouse but transient thoughts of joy or gloom.
O law unjust, O grimmest of all maids,
Inexorable princess of the shade