When Mickiewicz addressed the revolutionary and warrior youth of Poland, he said, ‘Strong through union, wise through self-denial, forwards! my young friends!’ Krasinski said, in a song now as popular as once were Mickiewicz’s words, ‘No man can build with mud, and highest wisdom still is highest virtue.’ These are the watchwords of two different epochs. The ruling inspiration of the whole of the poetry of Krasinski is the abjuration of all hatred and of all vengeance--that force alone will not enable us to contend successfully against force, but that the weapons of our warfare must be superior powers of soul--that, in order to conquer one’s enemy, it is not enough that we have the right on our side, unless that right rests upon strong and pure moral sentiments; that the most powerful levers are love, and the virtues of self-sacrifice and of heroic patience. One of the heroes of his ‘Infernal Comedy’ is Pancrace, the type of that brutal strength which yields and quails in helplessness before a superior power. The same inspiration reigns in his Greek poem ‘Iridion,’ where the Christian hero is a passive martyr, with a horror of vengeance, who triumphs over Rome, and confounds the patriotism of Iridion, a man who had no thoughts beyond revenge, and who makes shipwreck in spite of the justice of his complaints and of his cause. This is also the thought embodied in ‘Aurora,’ in the ‘Psalms of the Future.’ In all these songs the Polish soul thrills with mystic ardour, glows with enthusiasm, and with inexhaustible youth. ‘Lord!’ says Krasinski, in one Psalm, ‘what we crave is not hope, since she descends upon us like rain upon flowers. It is not the death of our foes, since that death is written in the clouds of to-morrow. It is not arms, since they are placed in our hands by Thee. It is not help, for Thou hast opened a free path before us; but we implore, put a pure spirit in our inmost hearts. O Holy Spirit! who dost teach us that our great strength doth lie in sacrifice, grant that we by love may lead the nations to the ends we seek!’ But in a fragment of his ‘Aurora,’ Krasinski has still better described this part of heroic expiation:--‘Is it then required that we should be murderers with murderers, and criminals with criminals? Must we lie, hate, slay likewise, and blaspheme? The world cries: At this price you may have power and liberty; without it, nothing! but nay, my soul! nay; not with such arms as these. The weight of sacrifice alone can in its turn crush down the weight which crushes us. In the world’s story, sacrifice is lionlike and unconquered still; but crime is as the chaff which the wind in passing sweeps away.