Honvéd or national army. Later on he was compelled by the Austrians as a punishment to serve in their army as a private soldier, and in that capacity he spent a year in Lombardy, which was then in the hands of the Austrians. On returning home he lived in Budapest as an author and editor, friendless, discontented and immersed in fantastical dreams. His soul thirsted for the extraordinary and the grand, and he shunned commonplace people. "Our age," he said bitterly, "is the conspiracy of organised mediocrity against genius." In poetry he sought for the great, the profound, the surprising. As a young man he fell in love with a dancer named Gina, who was famous for her beauty, and who became for him the symbol of an unattainable ideal. This ideal, who, by the way, was another man's mistress, he met again thirty years later, and the meeting inspired his finest poem, After Thirty Years, in which life's tragedy is expressed with great pathos.
"And so we have met once more," he says, "our last meeting this side of the grave. When once I am dead you will know what I am to you, eternal love enshrined in song. Heaven has betrothed us to one another. You who have loved so many, and I who have loved but you alone, here we stand and take one long last look at one another."
"Their looks expressed the grief not of those who had lost Eden, but of those who had never gained it."
"Thus the moon seems to repose on a lofty cloud, when the storm has been lulled to rest, and to gaze sadly down upon the night, but without passion; she hears the infinite silence of the forest, like the silence of the tomb, while from the trees big heavy teardrops fall noiselessly upon the dead leaves which strew the ground beneath."
