watered by the Saale, the Elbe, and the Danube, and the three rivers give their names to the three cantos. Kollar and his companion everywhere search and find traces of the former Slav inhabitants of the countries which they visit. The edition of 1824 first contained the "fore-song" (předzpěv), or introduction, written in distichs, in which Kollar bewails the fate of the early inhabitants of Northern Germany. These verses rank among the finest in the whole range of modern Slav poetry. In 1832 Kollar published a third, again enlarged, collection of his sonnets. The second canto was considerably added to, and now entitled The Elbe, the Rhine, and the Vltava.[1] Two new cantos were added under the names of Lethe and Acheron. Kollar chose those names to give unity to his poem, as the former cantos had also been named after rivers. But the two new cantos are really a Slavic Paradiso and Inferno modelled on Dante. Kollar has here glorified and stigmatised those whom he considered prominent friends or enemies of the Slav race. It must be confessed that large portions of these cantos consist in a mere enumeration of names, often of persons who have long sunk into oblivion. Thus we find in hell a Miss Pardoe, who wrote a long-forgotten book of travels in Hungary, in which she, it appears, adopted the Hungarian standpoint, always hostile to the Slavs. Kollar, in his new peregrinations, is no longer accompanied by Milek, but by the "Daughter of Sláva," the glorified Mina Schmidt. The last sonnet of the poem, which I shall translate, contains an appeal of the "Daughter of Sláva" to all her countrymen, exhorting them to concord.
Though no subject could then be more original than the glorification of the then little-known Slav races,
- ↑ In German "Moldau."
