Adam Mickiewicz, The National Poet of Poland

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX THE END (1844-I855) "I was transfixed to my Poland with body and with soul. All her feelings I took unto myself, except despair. I poured her tears, her blood, into the chalice of my heart. I gathered to my bosom her every cry of pain, and bound it to the strained string of my soul. I am dust, but with a heart in which the mourning of the nation sobs, with a lyre upon my breast through which millions weep." Severyn Goszczynski. The last eleven years of Adam Mickiewicz's mortal pilgrimage are little more than a chronicle of a soul struggling in the toils. They are marked by few, if any, outward events, save those two attempts to found a Polish legion in Italy and in Turkey respectively, both of which were doomed to the failure that dogged all Mickiewicz's patriotic enterprises, and the last of which he sealed with his death. The closing span of his term on earth shows us a man beaten down by sorrow and disappointment, but who still faced the battle of life with an undisturbed and intrepid heart: a man who lived for the comforting and strengthening of his brother-Poles and fellow-men; ever toiling, in every way save that to which his star had pointed him, for the welfare and redemption of his beloved nation, seeking it in each turn of political events in Europe, and especially in France, never to find it, yet never to lose his unshaken faith. His was, in marked degree, that eternal ever-youthful hope that seems, by some strange irony of fate, to be the birthright of the children of tragic Poland. Mickiewicz had now lost all. He had lost his chair and with it the only means of self-support and self-expression that were still left to him. He had lost not admiration or love, for these followed him to his death and beyond his death: ...