Nevertheless Shevchenko had returned a broken man. He produced one more long poem, _Maria_, a story of the Blessed Virgin which differs in some ways from the ecclesiastical tradition. For this he was denounced as irreligious. Yet that is hardly the word to be used, for there is a deep religious feeling in the work and if he has violated the sacred story to make more poignant the character of the Blessed Virgin and to equate her life history with that of the suffering Ukraine, the poem does not deserve the severe abuse that has been directed against it by the more literal minded. He aimed to show the apparent overwhelming of the right and the temporary triumph of evil but he never had in his own mind any doubt as to the final outcome, whether the time of waiting and of suffering were long or short. The vast majority of his poems after his return, however, are either adaptations and imitations of the Psalms and the Old Testament or they are pathetic expressions of his hope for a little home on the banks of the Dnieper and for at least a few years of happy family life. He was weary of the struggle that he had waged for his people for his entire life. He had succeeded in freeing his own family from serfdom and the broken and exhausted man felt that he could now hope for something for himself. It was not to be and an untimely death struck him down just a few days before the tsar had definitely abolished that serfdom against which he had fought so violently. The importance of Shevchenko cannot be overemphasized. He was the greatest of the Ukrainian poets and he was more than that. He was the first writer who was purely and thoroughly Ukrainian, who dared to dream of a Ukrainian language and literature that would be completely separate from Russian and would have an independent place in the world. He had started his career with the romantic dream of perpetuating the memory of the conflicts between the Kozaks and the Poles and of reviving the old days when the free Kozaks were able to carve out a precarious liberty for themselves and their people. Experience and observation taught him that that was impossible. He always valued the positive ideals of the old days, he realized the courage and the heroism of the leaders and still more of the ordinary man of the time. But he soon saw that that was not enough and that those days would not return. It was necessary to build for the future and he considered all that had passed since that fateful treaty of Pereyaslavl the unfortunate consequences of a mistake.