people’s tears flow over its gleaming fabric; and fervent, eternally human hearts beat now passionately, now dreamily under its freely fluttering shelter . . . Aloft! . . . Along ancient paths, through rustling forests, around curves of the ocean into the peaceful Slovak lands will I guide you. Through my veil will you see it, the own sister of that Aryan people which drinks from the Ganges. Those Slovak lands which you will see bear not as yet the Turanian yoke; they still know not the sorrow which now for a thousand years has pierced the heavens as changelessly as their mountains eternally tower into the blue sky. The dark cloud, the shadow of cruel fate, does not yet hover over the sunny region where the grass waves in the wind and clear waters bubble forth. A free people still lives amid free mountains. And yet disunion is already accomplishing its own destruction. Two princes have met in hatred before there were born Radúz and Mahulena, of whose sorrows I shall today tell you the story. . .
I am a tale of old, the own sister of those whom the Ganges nursed, and of those who dreamed on the heights of Iran, where burn the brightest stars, and of those who knew the red midnight sun in the Scandinavian wildernesses, and of those who in Grecian groves beside ancient oceans nestled like swallows in the white marble temples, and, last of all, of those who in gloomy forests of oak where the Druids worshipped the pale moon, danced their rounds about the pale mistletoe. . . . I am a tale of old. A mystic smoke is wafted before me and behind me blows the wind of the ages. . . . Who follows me sees the ancient marvels of the fates. . . . And yet what he shall see today is simple as the heart of my people. is simple as its quiet cottages beneath green groves.
It is a simple cottage of my people, in very truth—and yet a golden wreath lies there beneath the threshold; its charm is that of the people’s surging poetic spirit! . . .
She descends slowly from the crags, playing the song on the violin. When she has vanished and the song is ended, a wooded valley appears with a large meadow 1n the foreground. On one side a clear spring gushes from the crag. Not far from it Radúz is sleeping in the grass. It is early morning.
Radovid (Approaching).—Here at last have I come forth to God’s day. I had begun to think that there would be no end to
