United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He took out the spigots, and immediately three streamlets spurted forth, gurgling, one white as silver, the second red as carnelian, the third yellow: with a triple rainbow they played on high; they fell in a hundred cups and hummed in a hundred glasses. The gentry ran riot: some drank, others wished a hundred years to the Count, all shouted, “Down with the Soplica!”
Me, whom Radziwill had called ‘my dear’! Me, who, when I rode forth from my hamlet, had led with me a train more numerous than a prince’s! And when I drew my sabre, then many thousand sabres had glittered round about, striking terror to the lords’ castles,—But now the very children of the peasant boors laughed at me! So paltry had I quickly made myself in the eyes of men! Jacek Soplica!
So, whenever the grey one was on top, they would cry, ‘Vivat Soplica; foh, the Horeszko cowards!’ but when it fell, they shouted, ‘Get up, Soplica; don’t give in to the magnate—that’s shameful for a gentleman!’ So we laughed and waited to see which would beat; but suddenly little Zosia, moved with pity for the birds, ran up and covered those warriors with her tiny hand: they still fought in her hands till the feathers flew, such was the fury of those little scamps.
He who knows the feeling of pride——” Here the Bernardine grew weak and fell back on the bed, and the Warden said, deeply moved:— “Great are the judgments of God! It is the truth! the truth! So is it you? and are you Jacek? the Soplica? in a monk’s cowl? Have you been living a beggar’s life!
The Poles used to have worse broils with Lithuania than the Horeszkos with the Soplica family; but when Queen Jadwiga198 took the matter under advisement, then that difficulty too was settled out of court. It is a good thing when the parties have maidens or widows to give in marriage; then a compromise is always ready at hand.
While Gerwazy has but a pennyworth of spirit, and enough strength to move even with one little finger his penknife, which still hangs on the wall, never shall a Soplica get this castle!” “O!” cried the Count, raising his hands on high, “I had a fair foreboding that I loved these walls, though I knew not that they contained such treasures, so many dramatic memories, and so many tales!
Later, Mickiewicz threw back the time of his action to the autumn of 1811 and the spring of 1812; thus, by giving his poem a political background in the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, he transformed his village idyl into a national epic. The Monk Robak, or Jacek Soplica, and not his commonplace son Thaddeus, now became the real hero of the poem.
Again his eyes closed fast and his ears rang—he sees a throng of mounted gentry; their sabres glitter: “The foray, the foray against Korelicze, and Rymsza at the head!” And he beholds himself, how he flies on a grey horse, with his dreadful sword uplifted above his head; his taratatka,101 opened wide, rustles in the breeze; his red plumed hat has fallen backward from his left ear; he flies on, and upon the road overthrows both horsemen and foot-travellers, and finally he burns the Soplica in his barn.
I too will tell you, sir, something which, though not so marvellous as that omen, is nevertheless hard to understand. You know that in old days I should have been glad to drown the Soplica family in a spoonful of water; and yet of this young fellow Thaddeus I was always immensely fond, from his childhood up.
Finally, the whole poem is perfect in its proportions; from its homely beginning, with pictures of rural simplicity and old-fashioned hospitality, it swells into rustic grandeur in the panorama of the hunt, and at last reaches the most poignant tragedy in the scene about the death-bed of Jacek Soplica: then, lest the impression should be one of total sadness, the narrative concludes with the magnificent epilogue of the last two books, full of hopes of rescue for Poland, full of gaiety and courage.
Word Of The Day