You feel that they could all do things
if they tried. They are a sympathetic, interesting, interested, and,
above all, a magnetic people. This forms the top soil for a nation
which has put forth so much of wonder and sweetness to enrich the
world, but the reason which lies deep down at the root of the matter
for the _soul_ which thrills through all this melody of song and story
is in the sorrowful and tragic history of this nation.
The Poles are a race of burning patriots. To-day they are as keen over
national sufferings and national wrongs as on that unfortunate clay
when they went into a fiercely unwilling and resentful captivity.
Their pride, their courage, their bitterness of spirit, their longing
for revenge now no longer find an outlet on the battlefield. Yet it
smoulders continually in their innermost being. You must crush the
heart, you must subdue a people, you must be no stranger to anguish
and loss if you would discover the singer and the song. And so
Poland's fierce and unrelenting patriotism has placed the divine spark
of a genius which thrills a world in souls whose sweetest song is a
cry wrung from a patriot's heart.
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