We must mention two poems of this period. One is the _Prophet_ in which he sets forth the value of the poet as a proclaimer of the divine ideals but the unappreciative people reject and kill him and choose a tsar in his place. The other is _To the Poles_, in which he laments the feud that the Jesuits had stirred up to destroy the harmony that had once prevailed between the free Poles and the free Kozaks. The poem is far removed from the glorification of the Kozak wars in the poems of the _Kobzar_ and the more romantic dreams of a free Ukraine, but Shevchenko in his life and thinking had passed from the right bank of the Dnieper to the Hetman state and he realized the many conflicting elements that had wrecked Ukrainian existence. He saw now that they were more serious and more complicated than he had once believed and from this time on he rarely alluded to those old battles and never with the anger against the Poles that had once been so manifest. It is however interesting that he never relented in his distrust of and hostility to the Russians and in his condemnation of the tsars for their destruction of the rights of the Sich and the free Kozaks. On his release from captivity, Shevchenko dashed off in a few days one of his great poems, the _Neophytes_, a tale of ancient Rome and the persecution of the early Christians, dedicated to his friend Shchepkin. We can hardly fail to see in this as in the other poems of the ancient world the influence of his old master Bryulov, who had laid the basis for his fame by his scenes from classical antiquity. Yet the story of the young Christian whose heroic martyrdom for the faith finally converted his mother to Christianity and faith in the Crucified was perhaps a symbol of the spreading power of Ukrainian self-confidence. The comparison between the tyrannical Nero and the Russian tsar was so evident that it terrified some of the poet’s friends as Kulish who feared that new misfortunes would come upon the poet. None did but it is a tribute to the courage and unbending loyalty of Shevchenko to his ideals that he never wavered in them even at the most critical times. His message of freedom and of kindness he would not dilute or hide, no matter what it might cost him personally or how more timid men might take to cover.