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When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully for his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of "Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very Benvenuto of grace and skill.
It was even asserted by the anti-admiral faction that the seven weren't pirates at all, but merely Cuban mauvais sujets, hawkers of derogatory coplas, and known freethinkers. In any case, excited people cheered the High Sheriff and the returning infantry, because it was pleasant to hang any kind of Spaniard.
The Mussulman proprietor of these books and his descendants were dead, or had emigrated to Africa, abandoning the treasure which was to see the light in a more tolerant epoch. Pamo. Las coplas del Peregrino de Puey Monçon. Zaragoza, 1897. Pet. en 8vo.
In the same year with Hyperion came the Voices of the Night, a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the translations, with a selection from the verses of the Literary Gazette, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of newspapers gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys, and introducing them decorously to the world.
With the single exception of Longfellow's beautiful rendering of the Coplas de Manrique, which is absolutely literal, while preserving all the grace and dignity of the original, I know of no translation from the Spanish which gives the reader any real idea of the beauty of Spanish literature in the past ages, nor even of such works of to-day as those of Juan Valera and some others.
There is seldom, if ever, any grossness in these spontaneous songs of the people never indecency or double meaning. No sooner has an event happened than it finds its history recorded in some of these popular coplas, and sung by the children at their play.
An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future drama as the index of its possibility, is the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, the composition of an unknown author.
No one can tell whence the rhymed jeux d'esprit come; they seem to spring spontaneously from the heart and lips of the people. Children are constantly heard singing coplas which are evidently of recent production, since they speak of recent events, and yet which have the air of old folklore ballads, of concentrated bits of history.
"It recalls to my mind," said she, "those lines of Longfellow's, from the Coplas de Manrique. "`Our lives are rivers, gliding free, To that unfathom'd boundless sea, The silent grave! Thither all earthly pomp and boast Roll, to be swallowed up and lost In one dark wave." "I prefer," said I, "Tennyson's Brook.
That beautiful park which, in the seventeenth century, had been laid out with such taste by the Conde-Duque de Olivares, the favourite of Philip IV, had been the scene of innumerable festivals which swallowed millions of money, and gave rise to many biting "pasquinas" and "coplas." To-day it is the Hyde Park of Spanish Society.
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