Both are men whose energy and strength of will give them power over the mind and will of others.

Both walk in false paths. The man of genius, led astray by love of the ideal, by desire of the lofty and transcendent, is careless of the quiet affections and humble duties of the every-day world. He asks of this earthly life more than it has to offer, and demands of himself and of his race a perfection that humanity has never yet attained. Baffled and disappointed, he throws from him the beautiful illusions of his youth, disowns his former faith in progress and regeneration, and devotes himself to the support of the established order, with the same zeal and courage with which he once assailed it and would have raised up a new world upon its ruins. All the charm, all the glory, that his imagination once lent to the dream of a golden future, now casts its light upon the crumbling monuments of the past. From the misty heights of transcendental speculation, he descends to accept a sensible religion, a religion of manifest signs, of outward power and splendor. It is the conquering creed before which the systems of the ancient world have fallen. It is the hereditary religion of his house; that beneath whose banner his forefathers have won dominion and renown.

The man of the people, on the other hand, the man of intellect, of practical wisdom, believes only in the present and the actual; if he looks to a future, it is a future bounded by this earthly life, limited to this earthly planet. Sprung of a race whose obscure lives neither chronicle nor monument records, the past is to him but the history of the crimes of a triumphant aristocracy, of the wrongs of an oppressed and imbruted people. His will is his religion; he acknowledges no other God than his intellect, that power by which he sways the minds of the people, and thinks to regulate the destinies of the world.

The aristocratic hero is called "The Man"; the representative of the masses receives the name of Pancratius. With neither of these men is the truth; and to neither is awarded the final triumph.

It has been made matter of reproach to our author, by some of the liberals of his own nation, that, in his delineation of these contrasted portraits, he has not shown himself wholly insensible to the prejudices of his order. It is not to be denied, that his sympathies are rather with the enthu

siast and the noble, than with the cold-blooded, irreverent man of the people. It could not but be so. The poet has many points in common with "The Man" of his drama. In birth, in genius, in ardor, in a quick sense of the true and beautiful, he is one with his hero; and, sharing with him the same gifts, he may have shared, too, in some measure, the same temptations. To the man of imagination and sentiment, the thought of ancient birth, of hereditary renown, must have a charm, at least over his fancy; and to the heir of large domain, though shielded by the double guard of philosophy and religious faith, there must come hours when the perils of his station are present to him; when he must tremble, if only with a transient fear, lest even upon his own high, free spirit the prejudices of caste should one day press their thraldom. It is a mournful and half-reluctant sympathy that he yields his high-born hero; nor does it make him unjust in his portrait of the representative of the plebeian order. He gives to the arguments of the democrat no less earnestness and energy, and greater force of reasoning, than he allows to those of his rival. He spares, in the mouth of Pancratius, no bitter word, no hateful truth, as, with stinging tongue, the leveller recounts the crimes and follies of a debased aristocracy, and, passing in review the ancestral portraits in the palace of the count, relates the history of too many a noble house. If, "The Man," in his indignant answer, repels his scoffs, and declares the ancient noble to have been the benefactor and protector of the people, our author allows the aristocrat a momentary triumph in the breasts of his readers, it may be forgiven to one who sees the cities of his native land yet adorned and enriched by the monuments of the munificence of his ancestors. *

as

The author of the Nieboska Komedyia has again been reproached with yielding to a certain aristocratic bias, when he relates, in all their horror and absurdity, the excesses of the wild mob whom Pancratius thinks to lead through blood and riot to a life of order and fraternal union. We believe that those who have brought this reproach against him

*

Richly endowed churches, and public gardens, in Warsaw and other cities of Poland, bearing the family name of the author of the Nieboska Komedyia, yet attest the ancient greatness and liberality of his house.

have taken but a hasty and superficial view of the purpose of the poet. He paints, indeed, with unsparing pencil, the scenes of violence and mad license which follow the sudden enfranchisement of a long degraded people; yet it is in no scorn of human nature that he writes; it is from no want of sympathy with the weak and low, no cold indifference to wrong. He does but give, unflinchingly, the truth, such as the history of the past has recorded it, such as the history of the future will again record it, if, before the season of this prefigured day of desolation, a purer disinterestedness govern not the dealings of man with his fellow; if a nobler faith than has heretofore lighted the counsels of collective man inform not the social chaos, and compose to harmony its jarring elements. Not to the ignorant and misguided people, not even to their presumptuous leader, is the lesson read which this picture of bloody horror is designed to teach. It is to the rulers who, refusing to recognize the principles on which alone government is founded, have turned to the uses of oppression and selfish ambition the power intrusted to them that they might protect and defend; to the so-called statesmen who have acknowledged no higher law than expediency, the poor expediency of the moment. It is for the enlightened and refined, for those whom intellect and high station have made as gods upon the earth; for those who, while their own lives were sunned by the light of knowledge, and made beautiful by the charms of poetry and the refinements of taste, have been content that their brother should sit in darkness and squalor; who, while the earth beneath them was heaving with the coming outbreak of the long smothered anguish, have taken their ease in their possessions. "The Man" himself points this moral, when, in the last hopeless days of their existence, he upbraids the nobles with the frivolity and selfishness which have prepared their ruin. He has not shared their apathy and recklessness; the crime that dooms him to partake their fate is of another order.

The introduction to the first part of the drama is in the form of an address to Poetry. In this prologue we find foreshadowed the errors and the fate of the man of genius whose career is traced in the scenes which follow. It is without title, and is, on a first reading, somewhat obscure. In this prologue, the author, after celebrating the power and

wide domain of Poetry, grieves over the unworthy uses to which it is too often brought, by those who, unconscious or unmindful that it is a holy trust, squander it in frivolous pastime, or pervert it to ignoble ends. He then declares the true office of the poetic faculty. The man on whom this holy gift has descended shall not waste his inspiration in fleeting words; he shall not profane it as the instrument of his ambition; it shall live in his life, and inform his every deed. It is in lending dignity to the humble virtues, in throwing radiance and charm over the scenes of common life, that Poetry wins its noblest triumph.

But blest is he in whom thou hast thy dwelling,
As the creating spirit dwells in nature;
Invisible, unheard, yet felt through all;

Ennobling all; the God before whose presence
Creation bends, confessing, He is here!

From this man's brow thy glory shall beam forth,
Even as a star, nor shall he ever set

A gulf of words between his soul and thee.
He shall love men, and shall go forth a man
Among his brothers. But who guards thee not,
Yielding thee forth a vain delight to men,
Upon his head thou scatterest fading flowers,
And turn'st away. He grasps thy parting gifts,
And twines these funeral garlands to the close.

This

The piece opens with the appearance of the tutelary angel who watches over the fortunes of "The Man." guardian spirit, ever striving for the redemption of his charge, would recall him from the ideal world to the world of reality and action, of duty and self-discipline; and would win him to substitute for vain dreams of human perfectibility a warm, living sympathy with his fellow-men. To this end, he

would bind him in the ties of the domestic affections.

GUARDIAN ANGEL. Peace upon earth, and among men goodBlessed is he, among created things,

Who hath a heart; he yet may be redeemed.
Wife good and gentle, be revealed to him!
Unto your house there shall a child be born.

[will!

The poet, accordingly, meets with a woman, lovely and gentle, in whom he thinks he has found the realization of his ideal. But the evil spirits who wait on man for his

ruin are as faithful to their office as those who watch over him for good; even while the priest is blessing the bridal, they are plotting how they may best spread their snares. They will call up before the poet the vision of his early love; they will tempt him with dreams of fame and power; they will draw him back from practical duties to Utopian

visions.

EVIL SPIRITS. Forth on your way, ye phantoms, seek the Thou at the head, shade of his buried mistress!

Decked out with flowers, and wreathed about with mist,
The poet's early love, lead thou the way!

Forth thou too, Fame, old eagle stuffed in hell!

Loosed from the pale whereon the hunter hung thee,
Spread forth thy huge, white pinions to the sun,
Above the poet's head. Forth from our vaults,
Come thou too, Eden, cracked, worm-eaten picture,
The work of Beelzebub! We 'Il mend thee up
With paint and glue, and varnish thee afresh ;
Now wrap thyself in clouds and seek the poet!
Compass him round; alternate day and night;
Let rocks and woods and waters be about him.
Thus, Mother Nature, thou invest the poet!"

[poet!

The evil spirit to whom the charge of personating his dead mistress is assigned departs upon her mission.

Midnight. EVIL SPIRIT (under the form of a maiden, flying). But late I walked the earth at this same hour;

Now the fierce demons drive me forth, and bid me
Put on the semblance of a holy spirit.

[Alights in a garden.

Flowers, weave yourselves in garlands for my hair!

[Hovers over a grave-yard.

Fresh bloom and winning graces of dead maidens,
Wafted on air, floating above the grave-hills,
Wreathe round my form, and blossom on my cheek!
Here the dark-haired one moulders. Round my brow
Hang your rich clusters, shadow of her tresses!
Beneath this stone, two blue, extinguished eyes;
Hither to me, fire that once burned in them!

A hundred tapers glimmer through those windows;
They laid a princess in the tomb to-day, -

Soft silk that wraps her, be thou borne to me!
Like a white bird I see it flutter hither.
Now, onward, onward!