Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/260

 246 HUNGARIAN LITEI{ATURE A lbeit among the clouds you fly ,· Now that the storm has laid it bare, Would you the traits of men display l Leaving this place, your home transfer l Oh, children, sing to me, I pray l Tompa wrote many simple and charming songs, some of them too elosety resembling in style the popular son gs, but that is easily explicable by the fact that during the forties, when he commenced to write, the popular style was in fashion. He extolled the J .owlan ds, as Petőfi did, but he fett, as Petőfi did not, that much of their romantic glory had departed. The Lowlands of the chivalrous highwaymen, the lowlands over which a deep peace seemed to brood undisturbed, have gone, and we see railroads, cornfields, plantations and farm-buildings everywhere. Petőfi, Arany and Tompa treated the Low­ lands like painters who hasten to sketch an interesting o ld house, full of rolnance, before it is destroyed. They immertalised them in their primeval state, before they had ch anged their ch aracter. "Ye Lowlands, " says Tompa, (l but a littie white and your wild poetic beauty will have vanished. Where the vast herds of cattle were wo nt to roam and untamed horses scampered at large in the waves of the mirage, the shepherd's fires will soon be extinguished and his pipe be mute for ever." In Tompa's lyrics, besides the all egoricai and popular features due to the age i n which he wrote, there is an element of sadoess due to the vicissitudes of his life, and a religiaus element emphasised by his occupation as a minister. A separatt. :lass of his poems consists of 1 1 flower tales," tales in which flowers act like living persons aceording to the characters with which the imagination ge nerally