No words come back from thee.[207]
The old Spanish ballads have often a resemblance to each other in their tone and phraseology; and occasionally several seem imitated from some common original. Thus, in another, on this same subject of the Count de Saldaña’s imprisonment, we find the length of time he had suffered, and the idea of his relationship and blood, enforced in the following words, not of the Count himself, but of Bernardo, when addressing the king:—
The very walls are wearied there,
So long in grief to hold
A man whom first in youth they saw,
And now see gray and old.
And if, for errors such as these,
The forfeit must be blood,
Enough of his has flowed from me,
When for your rights I stood.[208]