The heavens are overcast above, · the earth trembles below;
The people stand in silence, · gazing on the show.[22]
These are among the most picturesque passages in the poem. But it is throughout striking and original. It is, too, no less national, Christian, and loyal. It breathes everywhere the true Castilian spirit, such as the old chronicles represent it amidst the achievements and disasters of the Moorish wars; and has very few traces of an Arabic influence in its language, and none at all in its imagery or fancies. The whole of it, therefore, deserves to be read, and to be read in the original; for it is there only that we can obtain the fresh impressions it is fitted to give us of the rude but heroic period it represents: of the simplicity of the governments, and the loyalty and true-heartedness of the people; of the wide force of a primitive religious enthusiasm; of the picturesque state of manners and daily life in an age of trouble and confusion; and of the bold outlines of the national genius, which are often struck out where we should least think to find them. It is, indeed, a work which, as we read it, stirs us with the spirit of the times it describes; and as we lay it down and recollect the intellectual condition of Europe when it was written, and for a long period before, it seems certain, that, during the thousand years which elapsed from the time of the decay of Greek and Roman culture, down to the appearance of the “Divina Commedia,” no poetry was produced so original in its tone, or so full of natural feeling, picturesqueness, and energy.[23]
Three other poems, anonymous like that of the Cid, have been placed immediately after it, because they are found together in a single manuscript assigned to the thirteenth century, and because the language and style of at least the first of them seem to justify the conjecture that carries it so far back.[24]
The poem with which this manuscript opens is called “The Book of Apollonius,” and is the reproduction of a story whose origin is obscure, but which is itself familiar to us in the eighth book of Gower’s “Confessio Amantis,” and in the play of “Pericles,” that has sometimes been attributed to Shakspeare. It is found in Greek rhyme very early, but is here taken, almost without alteration of incident, from that great repository of popular fiction in the Middle Ages, the “Gesta Romanorum.” It consists of about twenty-six hundred lines, divided into stanzas of four verses, all terminating with the same rhyme. At the beginning, the author says, in his own person,—
In God’s name the most holy · and Saint Mary’s name most dear,
If they but guide and keep me · in their blessed love and fear,
I will strive to write a tale, · in mastery new and clear,
Where of royal Apollonius · the courtly you shall hear.
The new mastery or method—nueva maestría—here claimed may be the structure of the stanza and its rhyme; for, in other respects, the versification is like that of the Poem of the Cid; showing, however, more skill and exactness in the mere measure, and a slight improvement in the language. But the merit of the poem is small. It contains occasional notices of the manners of the age when it was produced,—among the rest, some sketches of a female jongleur, of the class soon afterwards severely denounced in the laws of Alfonso the Wise,—that are curious and interesting. Its chief attraction, however, is its story, and this, unhappily, is not original.[25]