ned her for several years to Grodno.
Her plea for the emancipation of woman found a strong antagonist in
Eleonore Ziemiecka (1869), who declared that the unlimited emancipation
of women is but a dream of unhappy and oppressed women, which, if
realized, would lead society to destruction. Ziemiecka insists that in
any sound society the natural mission of woman is that of a wife and
mother, and as the counsellor of man.

Marja Konopnicka is a lyric or rather elegiac poet of great power and
genius. Her poetry is not soothing and comforting, but painful,
pessimistic, and despairing. Freedom of thought, sometimes verging on
atheism, is the inspiration which she drew from the condition of her
country and of her people. She is the singer of despair; according to
her conception of the world, God has lost his fatherly feeling for the
world, or perhaps for Poland only:

"The thundercloud is thy crown, lightning thy garment,
The sun the stool of thy mighty feet.
What are human tears to thee? Dewdrops!
And yet omniscient, none is shed without thy will!
Indeed I And yet thou hast never dried them?" (H. S.)

Not to end with a misconception of this poet's nature, let it be
mentioned that love is not strange to her; but it is the love for her
native land, and for all those who in some way glorify her native land.
Such love she breathes in her ode to the great Polish painter Matejko,
when she writes of his great pictorial apostrophe to the glory of
Poland, _The Battle of Grunwald_, as _Zaleski_, also, eulogizes Matejko,
"who with the magic staff of the brush resuscitates Poland."

Though dramatic art is not the forte of the Polish race, the theatre has
produced some great actresses, chief among whom are Helen Marcello and
Wisnoska, who found such a tragic death at the hands of a jealous
Russian officer; Madame Popiel Svienska; and, greatest of all, Madame
Modrzejewska (Modjeska), whom Brandes calls a wonder of the nation.
Unfortunately, the range of Polish dramatic poetry and the despotically
ruled theatre at Warsaw could not satisfy Modjeska's genius. Her
repertoire is drawn mostly from the creations of Shakespeare and
Schiller; and with her art she has fascinated until her old age--she is
now about sixty-three--vast audiences in the capitals of almost all the
European states and in the United States, and vivified the noblest
creations of the greatest thinkers and poets.

We are forced to tr