FERNANDO CALDERON.
The next of our dramatists, Fernando Calderon, was born in 1809, and died at the age of thirty-six, having been a colonel, a state legislator, a magistrate, and the secretary of the government of Zacatecas, as well as an industrious writer. The most striking of his dramas are: The Tourney, Anne Boleyn, and The Return of the Crusader, which, says one of his admirers, are full of noble and chivalrous sentiments and spirited action. Calderon's talent was nothing if not dramatic; for even his lyrics, and especially his Soldier of Liberty, are characterized by a personal fire and animation. His plays, remarkable for warmth of sentiment, and his poems, chiefly lyrical, gained for him not only in Mexico, but in other Spanish-American republics, a degree of favor not often enjoyed by writers in the southern part of the New World. One of his most admired passages is the soliloquy of Isabella in The Tourney:
And this is life. Seeing the sable bier
Profoundest cowardice the mortal moves,
When is the tomb the sole asylum where
True peace abides. Where is the life that knows
Not weight of woe? For ever in torment,
For ever in tears, so runs our human fate
From infancy unto decrepit age.
Child, man, and most unfortunate womankind,
Pursue the magic and illusory shade
Which they call happiness, yet never find.
The gray-beard sad, complaining of his age,
Youth would enjoy; but, imbecile, forgets
The tortures that afflict his junior.
Life is a fever, a remediless fever,
It is a frenzy violent and mad.
Alas! its pleasures pass us like a flash,
Whence follows gloom of soul with rain of tears
Yet ever springs desire and fervid hope
To cheat our souls with what can never be.
Care and vacuity, and ephemeral joy.
These make themselves our poor reality.
So fades our youth, and our declining life's
A dismal light of undeception cast
Upon the narrow confines of the tomb....
The black cloth ... and the coffin miserable ...
Thus darkly flows the tide of life. Alas!
My end draws near, for which my spirit hopes,
As the wrecked sailor for a happy shore.
O cause of all my mourning my heart's balm,
Not thou, not even thou, wouldst me console:
None grieve for one that is already dead.
Albert! Albert! shalt thou o'er my grave
Pour out thy tears until our patient souls
Unite within the pure eternity.
With good reason is this thoughtful and feeling soliloquy prized by Calderon's countrymen, whose vicissitudes have taught them peculiar sympathy with the tristful mood to which he lends expression. The tone and style of the passage are tragic in a most dignified sense, and reflect much credit upon Mexican literature. A supplement to the views of mortality and eternity set forth in The Tourney is contained in a fragment written by Calderon in 1825; and as it may interest a Northern public to know what a Mexican poet thinks of the future state, we extract from it these hopeful lines:
Cold and coward spirits
Shun the thought of death
With unbelieving fear,
Vain-thinking that within the grave
Have love and joy their end.
Dullards! who believe not
The eternity divine!
The disembodied spirit
Ascends to regions high
Of freedom and of bliss,
And love's sweet sentiment,
A seed sown in our souls,
Doubt not God's hand doth guard it
And lead it up to him.
The soul but breathes in love,
Which is its essence and its food,
And without love would die.