Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/204

 CHAPTER XIV ALEXANDER PETŐFI IN 184 1, a young actor stepped into the sacred bower of Hungarian poetry, and suddenly, everything became changed there. New ftowers sprang up from the soil, and the very air seemed different. This revival of poetry, which occurred simultaneously with the political revival, was brought about by ALEXANDER PETŐFI (1822-1849). His personality was as extraordinary as his life and his poetry. At the age of eighteen he was a private soldier, and at twenty, a strolling actor leading a life of great privation. Yet by the time he was twenty-seven, he was the most famous poet in Hungary, and in the same year, on July 31, 1849, he died on the battlefield. His short life was one of r:estless wa ndering. For a long time the place of his birth was as littie known as that of his death. As a boy we find him mentioned now at this sch ool, and now at that. He was still a boy when he became a soldier, and in the course of a very sh ort time, he had lived in three countries, Hungary, Croatia and Styria. Next he was an actor, and the wanderer's knapsack, though more like a beggar's wa llet, fell to his share. He always put at the foot of a poem the name of the town in which it was written, and those names would furnish a list long enough to teach us the geography of Hungary. Doring the last yeaJ;" of his life, he was again in the army