The poets and writers of the Magyars, whom we have been studying in the preceding chapters, were, in a lesser or higher degree, authors of works whose excellence was, to a large extent, of a relative, or national and not of an absolute character. We now approach the study of Alexander Petőfi. His was a genius which, perhaps alone amongst Hungarian writers, so completely blended the peculiar national excellencies of Magyar poetry with the broader features of European literary greatness, as to entitle him to the admiration of all who can feel poetic beauty, irrespective of nationality or even language. Real poetry, like real music, appeals to all nations, and to all times. In Petőfi there is real poetry. Other poets are felicitous in expression, and the musical cadence of their diction endears them to their compatriots. Others again create one or two poetical types the charm of which lends grace and interest to even insignificant verses. Many more poets again play on religious, moral, or patriotic sentiments, and thus appeal to the hearts or imagination of readers with whom such sentiments easily wax overwhelming. In Petőfi there is more than all that. His language is rich and beautiful; yet it is not in his language that he excels. He never or very seldom borrows effect from appeals to morals or religion. He creates poetical phenomena—that is all. Where before him nobody ever surmised any poetic phenomena at all, there he conjures up a whole fairy-world of poetic conceptions, figures, events, or scenes. The true poet discovers the new land by creating it. In Nature herself there is no more poetry than in a grocer’s shop. Nor is there a trace of any other thought in Nature. There is no philosophy in it and no mathematics. Heaven alone knows how Nature is carrying on her business. She is the most wasteful of managers, and yet she is never bankrupt. She is as heedless as the most thoughtless of business men, and yet traces of profound thought appear to be discoverable in her dealings. And so the mathematician, or the physicist arrives at neatly limbed formulæ expressing so-called laws of Nature. Yet nothing can be more certain than that Nature herself is not acting on the lines of laws. To us, to human beings, it appears convenient and useful to bracket some of the happenings of infinite Nature between logical ideas, thereby giving us the satisfaction of “understanding” those happenings. Nature abhors being understood, yet by dint of an irrepressible desire of man, thinkers will always attempt at construing her by dressing up natural phenomena in the jackets of formulæ and in the petticoats of concepts.