“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, [pg xx] 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 book might find shelter beneath roofs of thatch, and that the village girls, as they spin and turn the wheel, humming the while their much-loved verses, of the girl who so loved to make music that while fiddling she lost her geese, or of the orphan, who, fair as the dawn, went to drive home the birds at eventide—if even those village girls might take into their hands this book, simple as their songs!
“So in my own day, along with the village sports, they sometimes read aloud, under the linden tree on the green, the song of Justina,[7] or the story of Wieslaw;[8] and the bailiff, dozing at the table, or the steward, or even the master of the farm, did not forbid us to read; [pg xxi] he himself would deign to listen, and would interpret the harder places to the younger folk; he praised the beauties and forgave the faults.