The first great Polish poetess who created her title of nobility by her own talent in the dreariest time of Polish literature was Elizabeth Druzbacka, née Kowalska. Born in 1687, in Great Poland, she passed her youth under the care of the cultured Panna Sieniawska, Chatelaine of Cracow, married the treasurer Druzbacki, and, as a widow, retired to the cloister of Tarnow, where she died in 1760. Though unacquainted with foreign languages, and therefore with foreign literatures, she drew her inspiration from her own poetic soul and rose high above the level of her poetic contemporaries prophesying a renascence of Polish literature. Her poetic works, published by Joseph Zaluski, the famous historian and bibliographer, and later Bishop of Kief, and republished several times since, show much poetic beauty and graceful originality of composition, though the material itself betrays sometimes the undeveloped taste of the time: she apostrophizes the elemental forces in her poem _Water, Fire, and Air_; she describes in inspired words the life of King David; the four seasons; she writes allegorically of the fortress built by God, locked with five gates (the soul of man, with its five senses); she sings praises of the forests, so dear to the Pole and to the Germans: "The dense and shady forests glow in richest colors: White is the birch tree, tender green its branches: The beech tree proud shines in its youthful fulness; The noble fir spreads green its lofty branches; Centuries' strength sleeps in the iron oak tree." (H. S.) Toward the end of the eighteenth century occurred the great and terrible events which, culminating in the tripartitionment of Poland, accomplished its political destruction as an independent commonwealth. This important event revolutionized the life, thought and aspirations of Polish women, suddenly expanded the horizon of their political ideas, and stirred them up to an understanding of the earnestness of national existence or national annihilation. These influences are constant, and ceaselessly interfere with the life of Polish womanhood, either encouraging them to great efforts or driving them to despair or denationalization. That great calamity, according to J. Moszczenska in Helene Lange's Handbook of the Woman's Movement, forced the Polish woman to take a deeper interest in the condition of her country and her own position, and impelled her to stand by the Polish man as companion of his misfortune, his exile, his solitude in foreign lands.