60 DESCRIPTIONS O* 1 NATURAL SCENERY. 



who served under the banners of the great Emperor iii Peru 

 and Chili, and sung in those distant regions the deeds of 

 arms in which he had borne a distinguished part. But in 

 the whole Epic of the Araucana of Don Alonso de Ercilla, 

 the immediate presence of volcanoes clad with eternal 

 snows, of valleys covered with tropical forests, and of arms 

 of the sea penetrating far into the land, have scarcely called 

 forth any description which can be termed graphical. The 

 excessive praise which Cervantes bestows on Ercilla, on the 

 occasion of the ingenious satirical review of Don Quixote's 

 books, is probably to be attributed only to the vehement 

 rivalry subsisting at that time between Spanish and Italian 

 poetry, though it would appear to have misled Voltaire and 

 several modern critics. The Araucana is, indeed, a work 

 imbued with a noble national feeling ; and the description 

 which it contains of the manners of a wild race who perish 

 in fighting for the freedom of their native land, is not 

 without animation ; but Ercilla's style is heavy, loaded to 

 excess with proper names, and without any trace of true 

 poetic inspiration. ( 9G ) 



"We recognise this essential element, however, in several 

 strophes of the Romancero Caballeresco ( 97 ) ; we perceive its 

 presence, mixed with a vein of religious melancholy, in the 

 writings of Pray Luis de Leon, as, for example, where he 

 celebrates the " eternal luminaries (resplandores eternales) 

 of the starry heaven" ; ( 98 ) and we find it in the great 

 creations of Calderon. The most profound critic of the 

 dramatic literature of different countries, my friend Ludwig 

 Tieck, has remarked the frequent occurrence in Calderon 

 and his cotemporaries of lyrical strains in varied metres, 

 often containing dazzlingly beautiful pictures of the ocean, of 



