Just about this time there appeared in Eletképek some very ordinary verses entitled "Word-Echoes," by one "Aggteleki,"[27] ostensibly addressed to a certain actress. I am now able to confess that I was the author of those verses. But for all that (though the verses were not so bad) I solemnly forbid any one at any time to include these verses among my works, for even now, forty years after the event, I am not such an old, decrepit, suicidally inclined fellow as Aggteleki was.
[27] Aged Teleki.
But, indeed, every one of the works that I wrote at that period breathe the same bitter tone. The paroxysms of a crushed spirit, the dreamy phantoms of a diseased imagination, self-contempt, a moon-sick view of the world in general, characterise all my tales belonging to that period. And yet they pleased people then. I even had imitators. I turned Petöfi himself away from the right path. He himself confessed that his novel entitled "Hóhér Kötele"[28] was written under the influence of my "Nyomarék naplója,"[29] a literary abortion.
[28] "The Hangman's Rope." It certainly is a wretched performance.—Tr.
[29] "The Cripple's Diary."
Who knows whither I should have got to with my tower of Babel, had not a healthy earthquake brought it to the ground?
One day Petöfi caught me in the act of touching up Bessy's portrait. He saw from my eyes that I had been weeping. I tried to hide it, for I was a bit ashamed.
"It is well that it is so, my son," said he on that occasion; "it is men who are unhappy that the world wants now."
A memorable saying!
It was in those days that he wrote "I dream, I dream of bloody days," and "My Songs," with this final strophe, all blood and fire:—