genus. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was considered the equal of the other two members of the triad. Yet, though a significant and powerful writer, posterity has come to recognise that he was not so original as Petőfi or Arany.
Michael Tompa (1817-1868) spent his life as a Calvinistic minister in the small country town of Hamva. He was by nature remarkably sensitive and his meditations were of an elegiac turn. His life was full of trials. Poverty and loneliness sat by his cradle. His father was a poor shoemaker and his mother died when he was a baby. The boy could only enter the high school by means of money earned by serving as fag to a wealthy youth. At school he once suffered a deep humiliation, for at the age of twenty his professor ordered him to be caned, and as a consequence he soon left the school. Both his sons died early, and he himself suffered from a lingering disease. His lyric poems reveal a soul refined and exalted by suffering.
During the fifties, the years of absolutism, the allegory was very much used, for poets dared not say all they meant, and so they concealed it in allegory. Tompa's most famous poems were of this character, and he was threatened with imprisonment on account of them. In a poem entitled To the Stork, he says: "Spring is here and the stork has returned to her old nest. But thou art deceived, oh bird, for here with us there is no spring. Fly back again to happier skies. Seek not our meadows, for they have become cemeteries. Stand not in the waters of our lakes, for they are mingled with blood. Dwell not upon our roofs, for fiery brands are on them. Return to the south, for thou art happier than we. To thee God has given two countries; we had but one, and have lost
