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friend, was sufficiently inspiring for me, as you will infer
from the following extract :
"From a Polish stock descended,
Yet a German by my birthright,
Equal is my love and longing I
For the Fatherland and Poland.
But to both I am an alien I
When I seek my father's homestead,
Seek the tombs where sleep our grandsires,
None the stranger's sorrow heedoth.
And the soilthat was my birthplace,
Where, a happy child, I sported,
Crowns with oak-leaf wreaths and roses
Every son bom of her people;
For the offspring of the Polack
Thorns she plats to bind his temples.
As the pine, whose roots the water
Washeth bare and undermineth.
Leaving naught to hold or nourish,
Trembleth, sinketb, falleth headlong —
O'er it, 'neath it, dance the billows;
Billows sport with its green branches:
So he sinketh in life's river,
Who no country hath to greet him.
Hath no home to love him fondly.
Hath no soil his life to cherish,
From his mother earth uprooted,
Orphaned through the world he wanders,
Homeless always, always alien."
Biernatzki probably never completed his tragedy, and,
with other similar projects, it was forgotten as soon as he
fully realized that graver occupations than poetry and
literature must be the business of his life.
He left the university of Kiel in 1818, after having made
good progress in oriental learning, and consequently in
biblical exegesis, as well as in most branches of theological
