ever needs iron and wooded
lands.

Ye forests! the last to come hunting among you was the last king who wore
the cap of Witold,64 the last fortunate warrior of the Jagiellos, and the
last huntsman among the rulers of Lithuania. Trees of my Fatherland! if
Heaven grants that I return to behold you, old friends, shall I find you
still? Do ye still live? Ye, among whom I once crept as a child--does great
Baublis65 still live, in whose bulk, hollowed by ages, as in a goodly
house, twelve could sup at table? Does the grove of Mendog66 still bloom
by the village church? And there in the Ukraine, does there still rise on
the banks of the Ros, before the mansion of the Holowinskis, that linden
tree so far-spreading that beneath its shade a hundred youths and a
hundred maidens were wont to join as partners in the dance?

Monuments of our fathers! how many of you each year are destroyed by the
axes of the merchants, or of the Muscovite government! These vandals leave
no refuge either for the forest warblers or for the bards, to whom your
shade was as dear as to the birds. Yet the linden of Czarnolas, responsive
to the voice of Jan Kochanowski, inspired in him so many rimes!67 Yet that
prattling oak still sings of so many marvels to the Cossack bard!68

How much do I owe to you, trees of my Homeland! A wretched huntsman,
fleeing from the mockery of my comrades, in exchange for the game that I
missed how many fancies did I capture beneath your calm, when in the wild
thicket, forgetful of the chase, I sat me down amid a clump of trees!
Around me here the greybearded moss showed silver, streaked with the blue
of dark, crushed berries; there heathery hillocks shone red, decked with
cowberries as with rosaries of coral.--All about was darkness: over me the
branches hung like low, thick, green clouds; somewhere above the
motionless vault the wind played with a wailing, roaring, howling,
crashing thunder; a strange, deafening uproar! It seemed to me that there
above my head rolled a hanging sea.

Below, the crumbling remains of cities meet the eye. Here an overthrown
oak protrudes from the ground, like an immense ruin; on it seem to rest
fragments of walls and columns; on this side are branching stumps, on that
half-rotted beams, enclosed with a hedge of grass. Within the barricade it
is terrible to look: there dwell the lords of the forest, wild boars,
bears, and wolves; at the gate lie the half-gnawed bones of some unwary
guests. Som