To Louis Kossuth

By Anonymous

Kossuth was a great Hungarian orator and patriot and leader of the Hungarian insurrection of 1848–9. He lived in exile for many years, visited America in 1851–2, where he was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm, and died in Turin, on March 20, 1894.

LIGHT of our fathers’ eyes, and in our own

Star of the unsetting sunset! for thy name

That on the front of noon was as a flame

In the great year nigh twenty years agone

When all the heavens of Europe shook and shone

With stormy wind and lightning, keeps its fame

And bears its witness all day through the same;

Not for past days and great deeds past alone,

Kossuth, we praise thee as our Landor praised,

But that now too we know thy voice upraised,

Thy voice, the trumpet of the truth of God,

Thine hand, the thunder-bearer’s, raised to smite

As with heaven’s lightning for a sword and rod

Men’s heads abased before the Muscovite.

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