frOREST 



Comrades let us follow the path 

 Traced out by the hand of Cotta ! 

 Our science will be proved by our work I 

 Our power will be tound iu union. 



The song was, and is, a favourite with the students, and 

 I was told that it was constantly sung by them on their 

 excursions to the forests of the Escural and of La 

 Grainja, in 1847 and 1848. 



I have seen a MSS. copy varying somewhat in phrase 

 and measure, but not in sentiment, with a notation of the 

 air to which it was sung, a strophe being sung in tenor by 

 a single voice, and each verse as an antistrophe sung by 

 another in bass, and then the strophe as a chorus sung by 

 all in tenor and bass in harmony. 



The verses I have cited I have heard sung to the air 

 of one of the popular songs of the Revolution. 



M. Bourgoing, minister plenipotentiary from France 

 to the Court of Madrid in the end of last century, tells in 

 a work published by him on his return to France, that 

 the forms of poetry in Spain are varied to a singular 

 degree ; their language, being very easy of inversion, is 

 capable of all .sorts of verses seen in modern language, but 

 they reckon three as those in general use blank verse 

 without any kind of rhyme, which differs from prose only 

 in the number of feet, and the orderly interchange of the 

 long and short syllables ; verses with perfect rhyme, 

 which they call consonamtes ; and what they call asonantes, 

 in which are written almost all their old plays, and many 

 of the modern ones. These commonly, says A I Bourgoing, 

 begin in a series of true verses, con>onantes, either in 

 common rhyme, and with equal feet or in alternate rhyme 

 and unequal measure. After a scene or two, sometimes 

 only a speech or two, comes the turn of the asonantes, 

 which generally last to the end of the piece, nnless in 

 some part the consonates reappear for a little time. These 

 asonantes are a string, often very long, of cadenced phrases 

 subject to a certain measure. Each of them is a verse j 



