The influence of the _puszta_ on the Magyar poets is undeniable; and Petőfi, more than any other Hungarian poet, seems to be the high-priest and devotee of the peculiar charms of the great plain. The real relation, however, between the poet and his country is that between the traveller and the mirage. It is in the eyes of the former that the latter is forming, and there alone. Petőfi creates the Fata Morgana, with which he fills the vast horizon of his beloved _puszta_. Although professionally a lyric poet, his lyrics are of the purely objective kind. Many of his best poems might be told in prose, and in any other language, without losing much of their charm. There is, in his best works, an abiding _fond_ of poetry, quite independent of the music or picturesqueness of his words, or the strikingness of his similes. Heine, in his best moments, rivals without always equalling him. Petőfi’s poems are mostly very short; they, as it were, only state the poetic scene which then works on the imagination or heart of the reader quite alone. When Heine speaks of the lonely pine-tree standing on the snow-covered heights of the north, dreaming of a palm perched in the far east on a rock burning with the heat of the sun of the desert, he strikes a chord that will vibrate in us long after and beyond the two simple stanzas in which he tells the story of the two trees. This is objective poetry. It is in this that Petőfi excels. Already in some of his earliest poems he writes perfect objective poetry. In “The Stolen Horse” (“_Lopott ló_,” 1843) we are told of one of those fleeting scenes in puszta-life, in which the poet by seizing the pregnant point where present, past and future meet, gives us the story of several lives in words so few as to seem insufficient for the telling even of a short anecdote. A _csikós_ dashes on a stolen horse over the vast plain. The rich owner of the noble animal, happening to pass by, recognizes his property, and calls upon the _csikós_ to stop and surrender the horse. The fellow takes no heed, and storms onward. Suddenly he stops, and turning round to the owner, he exclaims, “Don’t miss your horse too badly; you have so many of them. One heart was in my breast, and alas! your daughter has wrecked it;” and disappears in the desert. The story of the poor boy’s love for the haughty daughter of the rich man, her cruelty, the father’s pride, the boy’s vengeance, his entrance on the wild life of a “poor lad,” or robber; all that is pictured and suggested in the few words. In another poem, the first line of which is “The wife of the inn-keeper loved the vagabond” (“_A csaplárosné a betyárt szerette_,” 1844), the whole tragedy of true love thwarted by lawless love is told in a few lines. The vagabond (“_betyár_,” really “robber”) loves the maid of the wife of an inn-keeper in the _puszta_. The wife loves the robber, and being cut by him, drives away the poor girl, who dies of cold in the _puszta_.