"In my far home, a fair belief is found,
That double, by the Gods, each human soul
Created is... and, once so shaped, divided.
So shall the other half its fellow seek
O'er land, o'er sea, till when it once be found,
The parted halves, long-sundered, blend and mix
In one, at last! Feel'st thou this half-heart?
Beats it with pain, divided, in thy breast?
O... come!"
As a fact, my new friend and I had an interesting range of commonplace and practical topics, on which to exchange ideas. Sentimentalities were quite in abeyance. We were both interested in art, as well as in sundry of the less popular branches of literature, and in what scientifically underlies practical life. Moreover, I had been longtime enthusiastic as to Hungary and the Hungarians, the land, the race, the magnificent military history, the complicated, troublous aspects of the present and the future of the Magyar Kingdom. And though I cannot deny that I have met with more ardent Magyar patriots than Imre von N... for somehow he took a conservative view of his birth-land and fellow-citizens—still, he was always interested in clarifying my ideas. Again, contrary-wise, Lieutenant Imre was zealous in informing himself on matters and things pertaining to my own country and to its system of social and military life, as well as concerning a great deal more; even to my native language, of which he could speak precisely seven words, four of them too forcible for use in general polite society. Never was there a quicker, a more aggressively intelligent mind than his; the intellect that seeks to take in a thing as swiftly yet as fully as possible.... provided, as Imre confessed, with complete absence of shame, the topic "attracted" him. Fortunately, most interesting topics did so; and what he learned once, he learned for good and all. I smile now as I remember the range, far afield often, of our talks when we were in the mood for one. I think that in those first ten days of our intercourse we touched on, I should say, a hundred subjects—from Árpád the Great to the Seventh Symphony, from the prospects of the Ausgleich to the theory of Bisexual Languages, from Washington to Kossuth, from the novels of Jókai to the best gulyás, from harvesting-machines, drainage, income-taxes, and whether a woman ought to wear earrings or not, to the Future State! No,—one never was at a loss for a topic when with Imre, and one never tired of his talk about it, any more than one tired of Imre when mute as Memnon, because of his own meditations, or when he was, apparently, like the Jolly Young Waterman, "rowing along, thinking of nothing at all."