In this, the golden age of Polish literature, three
names stand out pre-eminently from a glowing con-
stellation : those of Adam Mickiewicz, Julius Stowacki
and Zygmunt Krasinski.
For the brilliance of his form and language,
Slowacki ranks hardly below Mickiewicz himself.
Beginning his poetical career as a close imitator of
Byron, he ended it in early manhood — death took him
at the age of thirty-nine — as a mystic and a devoted
patriot. Krasinski, the most ethereal among the
exponents of Mesyanism, taught his nation of the
love that will conquer sufferings of the cross that brings
man to the stars.' The third and greatest member of
this trinity of inspired poets, Adam Mickiewicz, is the
subject of this book.
On the Christmas Eve of 1798, Adam Mickiewicz
was born in the Lithuania whose wild, untrodden

' ** Thou hast given us, O Lord, a cross that brings us to Thy

stars." Zygmunt Krasinski, Psalm of Good Will,

8



YOUTH

forests, whose ever-changing and storm-laden skies,
he has . painted in colours unsurpassed in his nation's
literature. To the influences of his childhood he owed
much that was great both in his character and in his
genius. He was the son of an old house that had gone
down in the world. His father, Nicholas Mickiewicz,
was a somewhat struggling lawyer, who found the
maintenance of his little family of four boys no easy
task. Of his mother, Barbara, dead in his early man-
hood, Adam always retained the tenderest recollection.
