In the _Caucasus_ he sympathized with the still continuing struggle of the mountaineers to maintain their independence from the Russian yoke. He sees the pathos of the natives and he compares it with the fate of Ukraine before the Moscow arms. At the same time Shevchenko commenced to pay more attention to the suffering that he observed among the poor of his country. He had alluded to social ills in _Katerina_. Now he repeats and repeats the same message as in the _Hireling_ where the poor deceived girl never confesses to her son that she is his mother, until she is on her death bed. All her life long she has had to treat him as the child of the kindly couple who have taken her in and given her protection when her own parents had cast her out. The sufferings of the girl at the hands of Muscovite lovers and the cruelty of the village toward those who have transgressed its moral code weighed upon his soul and more than once he returns to this theme which was to be one of the chief subjects which he treated in later days. Another result of the dreams of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius is the _Heretic_, dedicated to Safarik and singing the praise of the great Czech patriot Jan Hus, who was burned at Constance for his religious and political views. Yet the treatment of Shevchenko is characteristic for he sees in Hus not so much the national hero or the great scholar as he does the representative of the common people. This is the first time when he went outside of Ukraine for a subject but we can see very clearly how those qualities which he glorified in Hus are precisely those which he desired for his own people and if we are to interpret any of his works symbolically we can do it here and feel that Hus is another lost leader of the Ukrainian people. A deeper and more tragic note appears in his works as the hour came for his arrest. There is more of the purely personal lyric, more of a feeling of pessimism as he realizes that he had attained a certain freedom for himself but that this only laid upon his shoulders the heavier burden of securing it for his own people. He could not enjoy his personal success while he remembered that his people and his family were still in bondage. More and more he came to draw inspiration from the Old Testament and the sufferings of Israel. His arrest threw these new feelings into the foreground and during his confinement in St. Petersburg, he produced a surprising quantity of excellent songs which expressed his sorrow and his discouragement. Let us take the following as an example: