"O serpent, stay! stay, O serpent! that thy painted skin may serve my sister as a pattern for the design and form of a rich cord, which I may give to my love; for this favor, may thy beauty and grace be esteemed beyond those of all other serpents."
"I have had enough to do with poetry," comments Montaigne on this couplet, "to say about this that not only is there nothing barbarous in this fancy, but that it is altogether worthy of Anacreon." Such is his enthusiasm, indeed, that he finds in this simple and faithful expression of sentiment the highest form of poesy; "the true, the supreme, the divine; that which is above rules and beyond reasoning."[72]
Scarcely can we call these words extravagant, when, in our own century, another Frenchman, eminent as a scientific observer, and speaking from the results of personal study on the spot, has said of the songs of a tribe of this same Tupi stock, the Guarayos, that they cannot be surpassed for grace of language and delicacy of expression.[73]
Many interesting Klamath, Omaha and Zuni verses have been collected by the efforts of Gatschet, Dorsey, Cushing and other zealous laborers connected with the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, and these will shortly be accessible to all through the accurate publications of the government press.
The melodious Nahuatl tongue lent itself readily to poetic composition, and was cultivated enthusiastically in this direction long before the Conquest. Apparently the poetic dialect never freed itself from the use of unmeaning particles thrown in to complete the meter; as, indeed, may also be said of the English popular song dialect, which retains to this day very many such.[74]
With this exception the Tezcucan poets, for it was in that province that the muses were most assiduously worshiped, made use of a pure, brilliant, figurative style, and had developed a large variety of metrical forms.
One of the most famous disciples of the lyre was Nezahualcoyotl, himself sovereign of Tezcuco about the year 1460. He left seventy odes on philosophical and religious subjects, which were borne in memory and repeated after the Conquest. Translations of a few of them have come down to us, but my inquiries as to the whereabouts of the originals, if, indeed, they exist, have been fruitless.[75] The Jesuit, Horatio Carochi, published some ancient verses in his grammar of the Nahuatl (Mexico, 1645). Several which appear in later works do not seem to merit the credit of antiquity. They are more like those which Sahagun wrote and published, in Nahuatl, at a very early period,[76] Christian songs, intended to take the place of the ditties of love and chants of war, which the natives had such a passion for singing.
Under the title Cantares de los Mexicanos, there was long preserved in the library of the University of Mexico a manuscript of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with a large number of supposed ancient Aztec songs; but what has become of it now, nobody knows.[77] Thus it is that these precious monuments of antiquity are allowed to lie uncared for, through generations, until, at length, they fall a prey to ignorance or theft.
A few other fragments of Nahuatl poetry, all probably modern, but some of them the versification of native bards, might be named; but the whole of it, as now existing, could give us but a faint idea of the perfection to which the art appears to have attained in the palmy days of the great Tezcucan poet-prince.
In the literature of the Maya group of dialects, there have been preserved various sacred chants, some in the Books of Chilan Balam, others in the Kiche Popol Vuh. What are known as the "Maya Prophecies" are, as I have said, evidently the originals, or echoes of the mystic songs of the priests of Kukulkan and Itzamna, deities of the Maya pantheon, who were supposed to inspire their devotees with the power of foretelling the future.