not suit him; the epic and ode are his favourite forms. For, in him is much of the priest, of the seer of a nation. In the depth of his reticent heart he feels the whole life of his nation, and smarts unspeakably from its then degradation. Too proud to indulge in constant moanings, he is yet in an agony of rage and indignation at the oppression of his people. But this holy anger goes forth from him sculptured in songs, swelling with abiding life of beauty and power. Vörösmarty’s poetic vocation was, if not aroused, yet, undoubtedly, guided into the right direction by an epic of one Alexander Székely, a Unitarian preacher, entitled “The Szekler in Transylvania” (“_A Székelyek Erdélyországban_”), in which a not infelicitous attempt was made to work into one national song the ancient Magyar legends and mythology. An epic is the song of a nation whose critical dangers are not yet over. It may be said, without exaggeration, that heroic Wolfe in driving the French out of Canada (1759), drove out the last chance of the Americans for anything like a great national epic. In gaining their independence a few years after Wolfe’s success, the Americans also obtained perfect security. There was no serious enemy left to jeopardize their existence. The Indians could and did annoy them much; they could not seriously call their very existence in question. Hence the Indian tales of Fenimore Cooper are the only epics of the Americans. In Hungary matters stood quite differently. There the very existence of the nation was doubtful. A catastrophe might occur at any time. And in the terrible anguish of that “gigantic death” (“_nagyszerü halál_”), of which Vörösmarty sings in his “_Szózat_” (national hymn), the people of Hungary needed more than a drama or an ode can give. It needed a national poem of large dimensions in which the glories of the past were held up to the people as an incitement to the conquest of the trophies of the future; in which the powers of the Divine were shown to have a personal interest in the destinies of the nation; and in which the sacred language of thirty generations of patriots glows in all the victorious beauty of perfection. When in 1748 Klopstock published his great epic, the “_Messias_,” he too desired to do his country a patriotic service. His aim was, however, at once larger and smaller than that of Vörösmarty. He meant chiefly to weld for the Germans the weapon of a better language. Beyond this he meant his epic for any nation whatever, its subject-matter being of universal acceptance amongst Christian nations. Not so Vörösmarty. He meant to write a Messianic epic, in which the Messiah was the Hungarian nation itself. He wanted to raise up a particular nation, his nation, to the consciousness of its force, of its vocation. And thus, while the intellectual scope of his poem was much more limited than that of either Milton or Klopstock, the intensity of its purport far exceeded both.