Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/223

 by the poet's strong individual feeling. When he describes a dingy, neglected roadside inn, in his Kutyakaparó, he not only draws a graphic picture of the scene, but he conveys that feeling of leaden dulness and tediousness which benumbs the traveller as he enters the house. We not only see a rickety, weatjer-beaten house, neglected rooms, and a morose inn-keeper, but we become a prey to the very feeling which overpowered the author. Another happy feature of his descriptions is that he does not depict an object as an isolated existence in space and time, but introduces it to us as the scene of a series of incidents.

He probes deeply into the mysteries of human existence, and displays an inclination to muse on the transient nature of things. For him, the present hour is filled with thoughts of the future. His poem At the End of September, reveals not only the happiness of the moment, his rapturous love for his wife, and the beauty of the castle garden around them, but also contains forebodings of the future, his early death and his widow's quick forgetfulness. Lyrics have three themes recurring: Love, Nature and Death. The three eternal motives are united by a melancholy presentiment in At the End of September. He commences by musing on Nature, then dwells on the idea of Death, and finally arrives at the third motive, Love.

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