This thought of the power of sacrifice, and of passive heroism, has filtered through our youth, and permeated even the masses; and this it is which is visible in the Poland of to-day, for the inspiration of the poet has become the feeling of the people. One other cause, and it is a strange and curious one, has also helped, during the last few years, to spread and to popularise these ideas, by suddenly throwing a new element into Polish society. When the Emperor Alexander II. ascended the throne, he signalised his accession by an amnesty, which, however incomplete, opened the gates of their fatherland to a multitude of exiles. Some came from the West, the others (and these the most numerous) came from Siberia. Those who had lived in France, or in England, naturally returned to their country embittered by thirty years of sufferings, accustomed to a Western atmosphere, nourished with all sorts of revolutionary ideas; in short, half strangers in their mind and manners. But with that tribe of exiles, called in Poland ‘Siberians,’ it was not so. They returned hardened and strengthened by habits of secret and solitary suffering. Calm and resigned, they were mystics to a certain extent, but their mysticism was of that grave and gentle kind, which has nothing fierce or hateful in its nature. It is a remarkable thing that, among these exiles returned from Siberia, the country has for the last years found its best men, the most apt for journalism, for professorships, for the administration of private and national establishments, such as the Agricultural Society. There are writers of talent who could not, it is true, sign their works with their names; but their names were not, therefore, the less well known. One brought back from Siberia a translation of ‘Faust,’ and is one of our most eminent critics; another has translated Shakespeare. A newspaper in Warsaw published a series of sketches of Caucasus, and of Asia, which were the work of ‘Siberians,’ and in which there was an indefinable mixture of freshness and resignation.