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INTRODUCTION
37

fundamental manifestations of life and expressed them clearly, forcefully, beautifully without the dimming mask of rhetorical flourish

The Vrchlický schools of writers imitate him in his technical verse construction and echo his thoughts of deep-seated world sorrow, wide sympathy for his fellow-men, longing for the moral and social regeneration of mankind, the hope of ultimate freedom from the existent destructive religious scepticism.

Among later poetic translators from the English is Antonín Klášterský who first acquainted his countrymen with the poems of John Hay, Bryant, Lowell, Lee Hamilton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, Joaquin Miller, Sidney Lanier, Stedman.

Eliška Krásnohorská whose real name is Eliška Pechová became a leader of her sex from the time, in 1870, when she entered literature in her twenty-third year. In 1875 she founded and has continued to serve as editor of the “Ženské Listy” (Woman’s Journal). She organized the “Minerva” society which in 1890 founded an advanced school for women students. As the guiding spirit of the Women's Industrial Society organized by Caroline Světlá she has, as has Božena Kunětická in a degree, rendered unmeasured service to the practical cause of women. These activities have lent their spirit to her literary productions, especially her poems which are full of the urge to practical, substantial patriotism, of appeal to aid the cause of the Balkan Slavs or other isolated Slavic groups or to recog-