And she laments that he has not yet allowed himself to
be prevailed on to give any of these touching and elegant
reminiscences to his English readers.] The young prince's manners
were equally noble with his principles, and not long in attracting
the most powerful eyes in the empire. During the remainder of the
reign of the Empress Catharine, she caused him to be treated with
protective kindness, and on her demise he was instantly removed by
the Emperor Paul from whatever surveillance had been left over him,
into the imperial palace of St. Petersburg, where this justly-admired
princely student of Vilna was to be the constant inmate and companion
of the youthful Alexander, the eldest son and heir of the empire.
Their studies, their amusements, were shared together; and they soon
became friends like brothers. About the same time, as has before been
related, Paul had given freedom to General Kosciusko and his
compatriot Niemcivitz. And still, after the death of that
mysteriously-destined sovereign, a halcyon sky seemed to hold its
bland aspects over Russia's Sclavonian sister people, ancient
Sarmatia. But ere long the scene changed, and the "seething-pot" of a
universal ambition, the crucible of nations, grasped by the hand of
Napoleon, began again to darken the world's atmosphere.
Kosciusko now looked on, sometimes with yet struggling hopes, then
with well-founded convictions that "the doom was not yet spent;" and
no more to be deluded one way or another, while such shifting grounds
and sudden earthquakes were erupting the earth under his feet, like
the prophet of old, boding worse things to come, he withdrew himself
far into the solitudes of nature, into the wide yet noiseless temple
of God, where the prayer of an honest man's heart might be heard and
answered by that all-merciful and all-wise Being, who sometimes
leaves proud men to themselves, to the lawless, headlong driving of
their arrogant passions, to show them, in the due turn of events,
what a vicious self-aggrandizing, abhorrent and despicable monster in
human shape such a noble creature, when turned from the divine
purpose of his creation, may become.
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