7^ COSMOS. 



This enthusiastic poetic inspiration is to be traced, howev- 

 er, in many slroph'^s of the Romancero Caballeresco ,* in the 

 rehgious melancholy pervading the writings of Fray Luis de 

 Leon, as, for instance, in his description of the charming night, 

 when he celebrates the eternal lights [resjolandores eteniales) 

 of the starry heavens ;t and in the compositions of Calderon. 



composed, has led me to read through the whole of this poem (which, 

 unfortunately, comprises 42,000 verses) on two occasions, once in Peni, 

 and again recently in Paris, wlien, by the kindness of a learned travel- 

 er, M. Tei'naux Compans, I received, for the purpose of comparing it 

 with Ercilla, a very scarce book, printed in 1596 at Lima, and contain- 

 ing the nineteen cantos of the Arauco domado {compiiesto for el Licen- 

 ciado Pedro de Ona natural de los Infantes de Engol en Chile'). Of the 

 epic poem of Ercilla, which Voltaire regarded as an Iliad, and Sis- 

 mondi as a newspaper in rhyme, the first fifteen cantos were composed 

 between 1555 and 1563, and were published in 1569; the later cantos 

 were first printed in 1590, only six years before the wretched poem of 

 Pedro de Ona, which bears the same title as one of the master-works 

 of Lope de Vega, in which the Cacique Caupolican is also the principal 

 personage. Ercilla is unaffected and true-hearted, especially in those 

 parts of his composition which he wrote in the field, mostly on the bark 

 of trees and the skins of animals, for want of paper. The description 

 of his poverty, and of the ingratitude which he, like others, experienced 

 at the court of King Philip, is extremely touching, particularly at the 

 close of the 37th canto : 



" Climas pas6, mude constelaciones, 

 Golfos inii^avegables navegando, 

 Estendiendo t-enor, vuestra corona 

 Hasta casi la austral frigida zona." 



'* The flower of my life is past; led by a late-earned experience, I will 

 renounce earthly things, weep, and no longer sing." The natural de- 

 scriptions of the garden of the sorcerer, of the tempest raised by Epo- 

 namon, and the delineation of the ocean (Part i., p. 80, 135, and 173; 

 Part ii., p. 130 and 161, in the edition of 1733), are wholly devoid of 

 life and animation. Geographical registers of words are accumulated 

 in such a manner that, in canto xxvii., twenty-seven proper names fol- 

 low each other in a single stanza of eight lines. Part ii. of the Aran- 

 cana is not by Ercilla, but is a continuation, in twenty cantos, by Diego 

 de Santistevan Osorio, appended to the thirty-seven cantos of Ercilla. 



* See, in Romancero de Romances Caballerescos e Historicos ordena- 

 Ao, por D. Augustin Duran, Part i., p. 189, and Part ii., p. 237, the fine 

 strophes commencing Yba declinando el dia — Su curso y ligeras horas, 

 and those on the flight of King Rodrigo, beginning 



'^Cuando las pintadas aves 

 Mudas estdn, y la tierra 

 A tenta escucha los rios" 



t Fray Luis de Leon, Obras Proprias y Traducciones, dedicadat a 

 Don Pedro Portocarero, 1681, p. 120: Noche serena. A deep feeling 

 for nature also manifests itself occasionally in the ancient mystic poetry 

 of the Spaniards (as, for instance, in Fray Luis de Granada, Santa Te* 

 resa de Jesus, and Malon de Chaide) ; but the natural pictures are gen- 

 erally only the external in»i:>stment under which the ideal religioui 

 conception is symbolized. 



