of the types of women just mentioned served him as an occasion for creating one of those scenes as replete with life poetic as are forests or rivers with life natural. In one sense indeed he was right in saying that he was “the wild flower of boundless Nature” (“_A korláttalan természet-Vadvirága vagyok én_”). His mode of creation was quite on the lines of that of Nature. A poem grew out of his mind as does a violet out of the ground. In him there is no reflection, no machinery, no hesitation. Every line rolls on with the assurance and self-contentedness of a rose-leaf budding forth from the stem. He has the meditated carelessness of Nature, and also her freshness, her immediateness and spontaneity. More particularly, he is like Nature in Hungary. From the heights of thought as lofty as the peaks of the Carpathian mountains, and as chilling as those snow-clad solitudes (see his superb philosophic flashes in the poems written at Szalk Szt Márton, in 1846), he descends into the tiny nest of homely sentiments as does a lark into the furrow. His indignation, patriotic or otherwise, is as terrible as are the inundations of the Theiss; and side by side with poems flaming with uncontrollable fire and restlessness are poems full of oriental calm and staid repose. Yet, in the poet’s own opinion, he resembled most the _puszta_ or immense plain of Hungary. Petőfi, who had tramped over nearly every part of his country, gave, in a magnificent poem, the palm of beauty to the steppes and pampas of central and southern Hungary. The _puszta_ in Hungary is really a series of some three thousand _pusztas_, of which the most famous is that of Hortobágy, near Debreczen, the praises of which Petőfi has sung in various exquisite poems. These _pusztas_ differ very much in physical character; some are covered with rich wheat-fields, tobacco plantations, or maize-forests; others again are swamps, or natron-ponds, or again waste lands, or heaths. This diversity of abundance and penury, ecstasy of nature and dreary desert, squares well with the rhapsodic temper of the Magyars in general, and that of Petőfi in particular. After miles and miles of deadly silence, the traveller enters one of the bustling “market-towns,” full of the eccentric and picturesque types of the _puszta_. There is the dignified farmer or peasant, with his smart, coquettish, and light-tongued wife, or _mennyecske_ (“little heaven”); there are the various shepherds and keepers of sheep (“_bojtár_”), oxen (“_gulyás_”), swine (“_kondás_”), or horses (“_csikós_”), each in his particular costume and each a different type of the Hungarian Bedouin. The “_bojtár_,” tending the immense herds of sheep and lambs in the pampas, is mild-tempered, musical and full of secret medical lore. The animals under his care are frequently ill, and he watches their instinctive ways of picking out the herbs that will cure them. So he acquires a knowledge of herbs and an insight into nature which makes him appear a wizard.