My joys come thronging; and my youth
No grief can jar, save when thou grievest its tone.
But though my faithful soul be thus in part
Untuned, when dissonance it feels in thee,
Still, still to thine turns back my trembling heart,
As jars the well-tuned string in sympathy
With that which trembles at the tuner’s art.[797]
Gregorio Silvestre, a Portuguese, who came in his childhood to Spain, and died there in 1570, was another of those who wrote according to the earlier modes of composition. He was a friend of Torres de Naharro, of Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, and of Heredia; and, for some time, imitated Castillejo in speaking lightly of Boscan and Garcilasso. But, as the Italian manner prevailed more and more, he yielded somewhat to the fashion; and, in his latter years, wrote sonnets, and ottava and terza rima, adding to their forms a careful finish not then enough valued in Spain.[798] All his poetry, notwithstanding the accident of his foreign birth, is written in pure and idiomatic Castilian; but the best of it is in the older style,—“the old rhymes,” as he called them,—in which, apparently, he felt more freedom than he did in the manner he subsequently adopted. His Glosses seem to have been most regarded by himself and his friends; and if the nature of the composition itself had been more elevated, they might still deserve the praise they at first received, for he shows great facility and ingenuity in their construction.[799]
His longer narrative poems—those on Daphne and Apollo, and on Pyramus and Thisbe, as well as one he called “The Residence of Love”—are not without merit, though they are among the less fortunate of his efforts. But his canciones are to be ranked with the very best in the language; full of the old true-hearted simplicity of feeling, and yet not without an artifice in their turns of expression, which, far from interfering with their point and effect, adds to both. Thus, one of them begins:—
Your locks are all of gold, my lady,