Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/275

 MADÁCH for a moment at the age whose doubts and griefs and longings found an interpreter in Madách. In 1849, when the Austri an bayonets and Cossack Jances had finished their work, the hangmao began his. There followed a stiiJness as of death. The intellectual leaders of the people were either exiled or imprisoned, or dumb with sorro w ; the nation mourned its greatest poet, Petőfi, slain upon the field of hattie ; its gran dest states­ man, Széchenyi, had lost his reason. The whole cou ntry was sunk in a heavy torpor. Those wh o loved her asked in agony, "Will she ever wake again ? " u It may be that they will not succeed in destroying the nation entirely, but the wou nds they have infiicted will perhaps never be thoroughly healed," said Széchenyi. The effect of ali this upon the mind of the people becomes clear when we read th e poets of those times. For is not the poet always the truest exponent of his age ? Vörösmarty's poetry in the fifties is like a glowing furnace in the depths of which most preciaus metals are at wh ite beat. ln his poem The Ho ary Gypsy, he imagines bimself to be listening to a gipsy's weird music, and in each tune his gloomy fancy seems to hear nothing but the echo of sad events. And wh en he thinks of the sufferings of Hungary, it seems to bim as though he 11 could hear the rushing wings of th e vulture that comes to renew the immortal pains of Prometheus." Another poet, Baj za, says, "Where there is no justice, only oppression and tyranny, freedom becomes a term of irony, and prison, which sh uts out the sight of woe, becames merciful." Arany, the most cultivated and tender-hearted of alithe poets, saw his country lying crushed and ruined, and as there is no kindness in telling the felled tree that it may revive and flower agai n, he abaodoned his old poetic