Almost in every country there is some proud cemetery, or some modest tomb-stone, adorned on such a day by a garland of evergreen, the pious offering of patriotic tenderness.

I past the last night in a sleepless dream.  And my soul wandered on the magnetic wings of the past, home to my beloved bleeding land, and I saw in the dead of the night, dark veiled shapes, with the paleness of eternal grief upon their brow, but terrible in the tearless silence of that grief, gliding over the churchyards of Hungary, and kneeling down to the head of the graves, and depositing the pious tribute of green and cypress upon them; and after a short prayer rising with clenched fists, and gnashing teeth, and then stealing away tearless and silent as they came—­stealing away, because the blood-hounds of my country’s murderer lurks from every corner on that night, and on this day, and leads to prison those who dare to show a pious remembrance to the beloved.  To-day, a smile on the lips of a Magyar is taken for a crime of defiance to tyranny, and a tear in his eye is equivalent to a revolt.  And yet I have seen, with the eye of my home-wandering soul, thousands performing the work of patriotic piety.

And I saw more.  When the pious offerers stole away, I saw the honoured dead half risen from their tombs, looking to the offerings, and whispering gloomily, “still a cypress, and still no flower of joy!  Is there still the chill of winter and the gloom of night over thee, fatherland? are we not yet revenged? and the sky of the east reddened suddenly, and quivered with bloody flames, and from the far, far west, a lightning flashed like a star-spangled stripe, and within its light a young eagle mounted and soared towards the quivering flames of the east, and as he drew near, upon his approaching, the flames changed into a radiant morning sun, and a voice from above was heard in answer to the question of the dead: 

“Sleep yet a short while; mine is the revenge.  I will make the stars of the west, the sun of the east; and when ye next awake, ye will find the flower of joy upon your cold bed.”

And the dead took the twig of cypress, the sign of resurrection, into their bony hands and lay down.

Such was the dream of my waking soul, and I prayed, and such was my prayer:  “Father, if thou deemest me worthy, take the cup from my people, and give it in their stead to me.”  And there was a whisper around me like the word “Amen.”  Such was my dream, half foresight and half prophecy; but resolution all.  However, none of those dead whom I saw, fell on the 15th of March.  They were victims of the royal perjury which betrayed the 15th of March.  The anniversary of our revolution has not the stain of a single drop of blood.

We, the elect of the nation, sat on that morning busily but quietly in the legislative hall of old Presburg, and without any flood of eloquence, passed our laws in short words, that the people shall be free; the burdens of feudality cease; the peasant become free proprietor; that equality of duties, equality of rights, shall be the fundamental law; and civil, political, social, and religious liberty, the common property of all the people, whatever tongue it may speak, or in whatever church pray, and that a national ministry shall execute these laws, and guard with its responsibility the chartered ancient independence of our Fatherland.