And what such speed demands?
From all the tender flowers ye fly,
And haste to rocks,—rocks rude and high;
Yet, if ye here can gently sleep,
Why such a wearying hurry keep?[920]
Borja was much respected during his long life; and died at Madrid, his native city, in 1658, seventy-seven years old. His religious poetry, some of which was first published after his death, has little value.[921]
Antonio de Mendoza, the courtly dramatist, who flourished between 1630 and 1660, is also to be numbered among the lyric poets of his time; and so are Cancer y Velasco, Cubillo, and Zarate, all of whom died in the latter part of the same period. Mendoza and Cancer inclined to the old national measures, and the two others to the Italian. None of them, however, is now often remembered.[922]
Not so the Count Bernardino de Rebolledo, a gentleman of the ancient Castilian stamp, who, though not a great poet, is one of those that are still kept in the memory and regard of their countrymen. He was born at Leon, in 1597, and from the age of fourteen was a soldier; serving first against the Turks and the powers of Barbary, and afterwards, during the Thirty Years’ war, in different parts of Germany, where, from the Emperor Ferdinand, he received the title of Count. In 1647, when peace returned, he was made ambassador to Denmark and lived long in the North, connected, as his poetry often proves him to have been, with the Danish court and with that of Christina of Sweden, in whose conversion one of his letters shows that he bore a part.[923] From 1662 he was a minister of state at Madrid; and when he died, in 1676, he was burdened with offices of all kinds, and enjoyed pensions and salaries to the amount of fifty thousand ducats a year.
It is singular that the poetry of a Spaniard should have first appeared in the North of Europe. But so it was in the case of Count Rebolledo. One volume of his works was published at Cologne in 1650, and another at Copenhagen in 1655. Each contains lyrical poems, both in the national and the Italian forms; and if none of them are remarkable, many are written with simplicity, and a few are beyond the spirit of their time.[924]
The names of several other authors might be added to this list, though they would add nothing to its dignity or value. Among them are Ribero, a Portuguese; Pedro Quiros, a Sevilian of note; Barrios, the persecuted Jew; Lucio y Espinossa, an Aragonese; Evia, a native of Guayaquil in Peru; Inez de la Cruz, a Mexican nun; Solís, the historian; Candamo, the dramatist; and Marcante, Montoro, and Negrete;—all of whom lived in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the last three of whom reached the threshold of the eighteenth, when the poetical spirit of their country seems to have become all but absolutely extinct.[925]