Then old, old words were sung and prayed and droned, While everybody dutifully cried, And when the village parson Rhythmically proclaimed— And this mortal shall put on immortality,— With a great welcoming And a great lightening I knew at last the ancient affirmation. When evening came I found the mother Sitting amidst her golden oak and plush In a kind of isolated stateliness. She led me in. “’Twas the stuff she took that did it,” She began; “I never knew till after she was dead. The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em All labelled “Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.” Oh ain’t it awful?” and she fell to crying miserably; “But wasn’t she real pretty in her coffin?” And then she cried again And clung to me. The Ecstasy of Pain (Fragmentary Reflections on the Art of Przybyszewski) ALEXANDER S. KAUN ... Out of the effervescent hurricane of light burst forth a terrible song. Despair, as if thousands of graves had torn open. As if the heavens had rent asunder, and the Son of Man had descended upon the earth to judge the good and the wicked. Millions of hands rose up to heaven in a mad horror of death—hands that prayed for mercy and charity. He heard a beastly roar, which like a geyser of a smoking sea of blood spurtled upward; and above all this he saw bony fingers that twisted and writhed in convulsions of fear and shouted to heaven: “Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae, ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes.” And he saw a multitudinous crowd that was lashed with an insane ecstacy of destruction, and above them a heaven that yawned with disease and fire. He saw how those miserable creatures wriggled and serpentined in hellish madnesses of life; he saw the bleeding backs furrowed by the whips into chunks; he saw all humanity demented, obsessed, with an inspired frenzy in the bestialized eyes. Slowly disappeared the procession of the doomed; wild cries intoxicated with despair died away in a death-rattle, and a sun, red like copper, shed a chatoyant green light on the puddles of blood. “Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae!” * * * * * This is a fragment from an early poem of Przybyszewski, _De Profundis_. It is a proper background to all the works of the Pole, to his plays, essays, novels, poems. At least I see him in that light.