Verse > Anthologies > James and Mary Ford, eds. > Every Day in the Year
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James and Mary Ford, eds.  Every Day in the Year.  1902.
 
March 20
To Louis Kossuth
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        5
  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,        10
  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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