Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13)

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  “La mano aprieta â Tizona,

  Y el talon fiere â Babieca.”

  But the spirit of Arbolan the Moor, though resolute in camps, is effeminate in courts; he is a diamond among scymitars, yet graceful in the dance; —

  “Diamante entre los alfanges,

  Gracioso en baylar las zambras.”

  The ancient ballads are stamped with the character of their heroes. Abundant illustrations of this could be given, but it is not necessary.

  Among the most spirited of the Moorish ballads are those which are interwoven’ in the History of the Civil Wars of Granada. The following, entitled “A very mournful Ballad on the Siege and Conquest of Alhama,” is very beautiful; and such was the effect it produced upon the Moors, that it was forbidden, on pain of death, to sing it within the walls of Granada. The translation, which is executed with great skill and fidelity, is from the pen of Lord Byron.

  “The Moorish king rides up and down,

  Through Granada’s royal town;

  From Elvira’s gates to those

  Of Bivarambla on he goes.

  Woe is me, Alhama!’

  “Letters to the monarch tell

  How Alhama’s city fell;

  In the fire the scroll he threw,

  And the messenger he slew.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “He quits his mule, and mounts his horse,

  And through the street directs his course;

  Through the street of Zacatin

  To the Alhambra spurring in.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “When the Alhambra’s walls he gained,

  On the moment he ordained

  That the trumpet straight should sound

  With the silver clarion round.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “And when the hollow drums of war

  Beat the loud alarm afar,

  That the Moors of town and plain

  Might answer to the martial strain, —

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “Then the Moors, by this aware

  That bloody Mars recalled them there,

  One by one, and two by two,

  To a mighty squadron grew.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “Out then spake an aged Moor

  In these words the king before: —

  ‘Wherefore call on us, O king?

  What may mean this gathering?

  ‘Woe is me, Alhama!

  “‘Friends! ye have, alas! to know

  Of a most disastrous blow;

  That the Christians, stern and bold,

  Have obtained Alhama’s hold.’

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “Out then spake old Alfaqui,

  With his beard so white to see: —

  ‘Good king, thou art justly served;

  Good king, this thou hast deserved.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “‘By thee were slain, in evil hour,

  The Abencerrage, Granada’s flower;

  And strangers were received by thee

  Of Cordova the chivalry.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “‘And for this, O king! is sent

  On thee a double chastisement;

  Thee and thine, thy crown and realm,

  One last wreck shall overwhelm.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “‘He who holds no laws in awe,

  He must perish by the law;

  And Granada must be won,

  And thyself with her undone.’

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “Fire flashed from out the old Moor’s eyes;

  The monarch’s wrath began to rise,

  Because he answered, and because

  He spake exceeding well of laws.

  Woe is me, Alhama!

  “‘There is no law to say such things

  As may disgust the ear of kings!’

  Thus, snorting with his choler, said

  The Moorish king, and doomed him dead.

  Woe is me, Alhama!”

  Such are the ancient ballads of Spain; poems which, like the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, have outlived the names of their builders. They are the handiwork of wandering, homeless minstrels, who for their daily bread thus “built the lofty rhyme” ; and whose names, like their dust and ashes, have long, long been whipped in a shroud. “These poets,” says an anonymous writer, “have left behind them no trace to which the imagination can attach itself; they have ‘died and made no sign.’ We pass from the infancy of Spanish poetry to the age of Charles, through a long vista of monuments without inscriptions, as the traveller approaches the noise and bustle of modern Rome through the lines of silent and unknown tombs that border the Appian Way.”

  Before closing this essay, I must allude to the unfavorable opinion which the learned Dr. Southey has expressed concerning the merit of these old Spanish ballads. In his preface to the Chronicle of the Cid, he says,— “The heroic ballads of the Spaniards have been overrated in this country; they are infinitely and every way inferior to our own; there are some spirited ones in the Guerras Civiles de Granada, from which the rest have been estimated; but, excepting these, I know none of any value among the many hundreds which I have perused.” On this field I am willing to do battle, though it be with a veteran knight who bears enchanted arms, and whose sword, like that of Martin Antolinez, “illumines all the field.” That the old Spanish ballads may have been overrated, and that as a whole they are inferior to the English, I concede; that many of the hundred ballads of the Cid are wanting in interest, and that many of those of the Twelve Peers of France are languid, and drawn out beyond the patience of the most patient reader, I concede; I willingly confess, also, that among them all I have found none that can rival in graphic power the short but wonderful ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, wherein the mariner sees “the new moon with the old moon in her arm,” or the more modern one of the Battle of Agincourt, by Michael Drayton, beginning, —

  “Fair stood the wind for France,

  As we our sails advance,

  Nor now to prove our chance

  Longer will tarry;

  But putting to the main,

  At Caux, the mouth of Seine,

  With all his martial train,

  Landed King Harry.”

  All this I readily concede; but that the old Spanish ballads are infinitely and every way inferior to the English, and that among them all there are none of any value, save a few which celebrate the civil wars of Granada, — this I deny. The March of Bernardo del Carpio is hardly inferior to Chevy Chase; and the ballad of the Conde Alarcos, in simplicity and pathos, has no peer in all English balladry, — it is superior to Edem o’ Gordon.

  But a truce to criticism. Already, methinks, I hear the voice of a drowsy and prosaic herald proclaiming, in the language of Don Quixote to the puppet-player, “Make an end, Master Peter; for it grows toward supper-time, and I have some symptoms of hunger upon me.”

  THE VILLAGE OF EL PARDILLO.

  When the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams we now see glide so quietly by us.

  IZAAK WALTON.

  IN that delicious season when the coy and capricious maidenhood of spring is swelling into the warmer, riper, and more voluptuous womanhood of summer, I left Madrid for the village of El Pardillo. I had already seen enough of the villages of the North of Spain to know that for the most part they have few charms to entice one from the city; but I was curious to see the peasantry of the land in their native homes, — to see how far the shepherds of Castile resemble those who sigh and sing in the pastoral romances of Montemayor and Gaspar Gil Polo.

  I love the city and its busy hum; I love that glad excitement of the crowd which makes the pulse beat quick, the freedom from restraint, the absence of those curious eyes and idle tongues which persecute one in villages and provincial t
owns. I love the country, too, in its season; and there is no scene over which my eye roves with more delight than the face of a summer landscape dimpled with soft sunny hollows, and smiling in all the freshness and luxuriance of June. There is no book in which I read sweeter lessons of virtue, or find the beauty of a quiet life more legibly recorded. My heart drinks in the tranquillity of the scene; and I never hear the sweet warble of a bird from its native wood, without a silent wish that such a cheerful voice and peaceful shade were mine. There is a beautiful moral feeling connected with every thing in rural life, which is not dreamed of in the philosophy of the city; the voice of the brook and the language of the winds and woods are no poetic fiction. What an impressive lesson is there in the opening bud of spring! what an eloquent homily in the fall of the autumnal leaf! How well does the song of a passing bird represent the glad but transitory days of youth! and in the hollow tree and hooting owl what a melancholy image of the decay and imbecility of old age! In the beautiful language of an English poet, —

  “Your voiceless lips, O flowers, are living preachers,

  Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book,

  Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers,

  From loneliest nook.

  “‘Neath cloistered boughs each floral bell that swingeth,

  And tolls its perfume on the passing air,

  Makes Sabbath in the fields, and ever ringeth

  A call to prayer;

  “Not to the domes where crumbling arch and column

  Attest the feebleness of mortal hand,

  But to that fane most catholic and solemn

  Which God hath planned;

  “To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,

  Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply, —

  Its choir the winds and waves, — its organ thunder, —

  Its dome the sky.

  “There, amid solitude and shade, I wander

  Through the green aisles, and, stretched upon the sod,

  Awed by the silence, reverently ponder

  The ways of God.”

  But the traveller who journeys through the northern provinces of Spain will look in vain for the charms of rural scenery in the villages he passes. Instead of trim cottages, and gardens, and the grateful shade of trees, he will see a cluster of stone hovels roofed with red tiles and basking in the hot sun, without a single tree to lend him shade or shelter; and instead of green meadows and woodlands vocal with the song of birds, he will find bleak and rugged mountains, and vast extended plains, that stretch away beyond his ken.

  It was my good fortune, however, to find, not many leagues from the metropolis, a village which could boast the shadow of a few trees. El Pardillo is situated on the southern slope of the Guadarrama Mountains, just where the last broken spurs of the sierra stretch forward into the vast table-land of New Castile. The village itself, like most other Castilian villages, is only a cluster of weather-stained and dilapidated houses, huddled together without beauty or regularity; but the scenery around it is picturesque, — a mingling of hill and dale, sprinkled with patches of cultivated land and clumps of forest-trees; and in the background the blue, vapory outline of the Guadarrama Mountains melting into the sky.

  In this quiet place I sojourned for a season, accompanied by the publican Don Valentin and his fair daughter Florencia. We took up our abode in the cottage of a peasant named Lucas, an honest tiller of the soil, simple and good-natured; or, in the more emphatic language of Don Valentin, “un hombre muy infeliz, y sin malicia ninguna.” Not so his wife Martina; she was a Tartar, and so mettlesome withal, that poor Lucas skulked doggedly about his own premises, with his head down and his tail between his legs.

  In this little village my occupations were few and simple. My morning’s walk was to the Cross of Espalmado, a large wooden crucifix in the fields; the day was passed with books, or with any idle companion I was lucky enough to catch by the button, and bribe with a cigar into a long story, or a little village gossip; and I whiled away the evening in peeping round among the cottagers, studying the beautiful landscape that spread before me, and watching the occasional gathering of a storm about the blue peaks of the Guadarrama Mountains. My favorite haunt was a secluded spot in a little woodland valley, through which a crystal brook ran brawling along its pebbly channel. There, stretched in the shadow of a tree, I often passed the hours of noontide heat, now reading the magic numbers of Garcilaso, and anon listening to the song of the nightingale overhead; or watching the toil of a patient ant, as he rolled his stone, like Sisyphus, up-hill, or the flight of a bee darting from flower to flower, and “hiding his murmurs in the rose.”

  Blame me not, thou studious moralist, — blame me not unheard for this idle dreaming; such moments are not wholly thrown away. In the language of G oethe, “I lie down in the grass near a falling brook, and close to the earth a thousand varieties of grasses become perceptible. When I listen to the hum of the little world between the stubble, and see the countless indescribable forms of insects, I feel the presence of the Almighty who has created us, — the breath of the All-benevolent who supports us in perpetual enjoyment.”

  The village church, too, was a spot around which I occasionally lingered of an evening, when in pensive or melancholy mood. And here, gentle reader, thy imagination will straightway conjure up a scene of ideal beauty, — a village church with decent white-washed walls, and modest spire just peeping forth from a clump of trees! No; I will not deceive thee; — the church of El Pardillo resembles not this picture of thy well tutored fancy. It is a gloomy little edifice, standing upon the outskirts of the village, and built of dark and unhewn stone, with a spire like a sugar-loaf. There is no grass-plot in front, but a little esplanade beaten hard by the footsteps of the church-going peasantry. The tombstone of one of the patriarchs of the village serves as a doorstep, and a single solitary tree throws its friendly shade upon the portals of the little sanctuary.

  One evening, as I loitered around this spot, the sound of an organ and the chant of youthful voices from within struck my ear; the church-door was ajar, and I entered. There stood the priest, surrounded by a group of children, who were singing a hymn to the Virgin: —

  “Ave, Regina coelorum,

  Ave, Domina angelorum.”

  There is something exceedingly thrilling in the voices of children singing. Though their music be unskilful, yet it finds its way to the heart with wonderful celerity. Voices of cherubs are they, for they breathe of paradise; clear, liquid tones, that flow from pure lips and innocent hearts, like the sweetest notes of a flute, or the falling of water from a fountain! When the chant was finished, the priest opened a little book which he held in his hand, and began, with a voice as solemn as a funeral bell, to question this class of roguish little catechumens, whom he was initiating into the mysterious doctrines of the mother church. Some of the questions and answers were so curious, that I cannot refrain from repeating them here; and should any one doubt their authenticity, he will find them in the Spanish catechisms.

  “In what consists the mystery of the Holy Trinity?”

  “In one God, who is three persons; and three persons, who are but one God.”

  u But tell me, — three human persons, are they not three men?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Then why are not three divine persons three Gods?”

  “Because three human persons have three human natures; but the three divine persons have only one divine nature.”

  “Can you explain this by an example?”

  “Yes, father; as a tree which has three branches is still but one tree, since all the three branches spring from one trunk, so the three divine persons are but one God, because they all have the same divine nature.”

  “Where were these three divine persons before the heavens and the earth were created?”

  “In themselves.”

  “Which of them was made man?”

  “The Son.”

  “And after the Son was made man, wa
s he still God?”

  “Yes, father; for in becoming man he did not cease to be God, any more than a man when he becomes a monk ceases to be a man.”

  “How was the Son of God made flesh?”

  “He was born of the most holy Virgin Mary.”

  “And can we still call her a virgin?”

  “Yes, father; for as a ray of the sun may pass through a pane of glass, and the glass remain unbroken, so the Virgin Mary, after the birth of her son, was a pure and holy virgin as before.”

  “Who died to save and redeem us?”

  “The Son of God: as man, and not as God.”

  “How could he suffer and die as man only, being both God and man, and yet but one person?”

  “As in a heated bar of iron upon which water is thrown, the heat only is affected and not the iron, so the Son of God suffered in his human nature and not in his divine.”

  “And when the spirit was separated from his most precious body, whither did the spirit go?”

  “To limbo, to glorify the souls of the holy fathers.”

  “And the body?”

  “It was carried to the grave.”

  “Did the divinity remain united with the spirit or with the body?”