ent fortune they will have leisure to hear of the
past! Then they will weep over the fate of their fathers, and then those
tears will not soil their cheeks.

"To-day, for us, unbidden guests in the world, in all the past and in all
the future--to-day there is but one region in which there is a crumb of
happiness for a Pole: the land of his childhood! That land will ever
remain holy and pure as first love; undisturbed by the remembrance of
errors, not undermined by the deceitfulness of hopes, and unchanged by the
stream of events.

* * * * * *

"Gladly would I greet with my thoughts those lands where I rarely wept and
never gnashed my teeth; lands of my childhood, where one roamed over the
world as through a meadow, and among the flowers knew only those that were
lovely and fair, throwing aside the poisonous, and not glancing at the
useful.

"That land, happy, poor, and narrow; as the world is God's, so that was
our own! How everything there belonged to us, how I remember all that
surrounded us, from the linden that with its magnificent crown afforded
shade to the children of the whole village, down to every stream and
stone; how every cranny of the land was familiar to us, as far as the
houses of our neighbours--the boundary line of our realm!

"And if at times a Muscovite made his appearance, he left behind him only
the memory of a fair and glittering uniform, for we knew the serpent only
by his skin.

"And only the dwellers in those lands have remained true to me until now;
some as faithful friends, some as trusty allies! For _who_ dwelt there?
Mother, brothers, kindred, good neighbours! When one of them passed away,
how tenderly did they speak of him! How many memories, what long-continued
sorrow, in that land where a servant is more devoted to his master than in
other countries a wife to her husband; where a soldier sorrows longer over
his weapons than here a son over his father; where they weep longer and
more sincerely over a dog than here the people weep for a hero!

"And in those days my friends aided my speech and cast me word after word
for my songs; like the fabled cranes on the wild island, which flew in
spring over the enchanted palace and heard the loud lament of an enchanted
boy: each bird threw the boy a single feather; he made him wings and
returned to his own people.

* * * * * *

"O, if some time I might attain this joy--that this