Luis de Leon’s health never recovered from the shock it suffered in the cells of the Inquisition. He lived, indeed, nearly fourteen years after his release; but most of his works, whether in Castilian or in Latin, were written before his imprisonment or during its continuance, while those he undertook afterwards, as his account of Santa Teresa and some others, were never finished. His life was always, from choice, very retired, and his austere manners were announced by his habitual reserve and silence. In a letter that he sent with his poems to his friend Puertocarrero, a statesman at the court of Philip the Second and a member of the principal council of the Inquisition, he says, that, in the kingdom of Old Castile, where he had lived from his youth, he could hardly claim to be familiarly acquainted with ten persons.[73] Still he was extensively known, and was held in great honor. In the latter part of his life especially, his talents and sufferings, his religious patience and his sincere faith, had consecrated him in the eyes alike of his friends and his enemies. Nothing relating to the monastic brotherhood of which he was a member, or to the University where he taught, was undertaken without his concurrence and support; and when he died, in 1591, he was in the exercise of a constantly increasing influence, having just been chosen the head of his Order, and being engaged in the preparation of new regulations for its reform.[74]
But besides the character in which we have thus far considered him, Luis de Leon was a poet, and a poet of no common genius. He seems, it is true, to have been little conscious, or, at least, little careful, of his poetical talent; for he made hardly an effort to cultivate it, and never took pains to print any thing, in order to prove its existence to the world. Perhaps, too, he showed more deference than was due to the opinion of many persons of his time, who thought poetry an occupation not becoming one in his position; for, in the prefatory notice to his sacred odes, he says, in a deprecating tone: “Let none regard verse as any thing new and unworthy to be applied to Scriptural subjects, for it is rather appropriate to them; and so old is it in this application, that, from the earliest ages of the Church to the present day, men of great learning and holiness have thus employed it. And would to God that no other poetry were ever sounded in our ears; that only these sacred tones were sweet to us; that none else were heard at night in the streets and public squares; that the child might still lisp it, the retired damsel find in it her best solace, and the industrious tradesman make it the relief of his toil! But the Christian name is now sunk to such immodest and reckless degradation, that we set our sins to music, and, not content with indulging them in secret, shout them joyfully forth to all who will listen.”
But whatever may have been his own feelings on the suitableness of such an occupation to his profession, it is certain, that, while most of the poems he has left us were written in his youth, they were not collected by him till the latter part of his life, and then only to please a personal friend, who never thought of publishing them; so that they were not printed at all till forty years after his death, when Quevedo gave them to the public, in the hope that they might help to reform the corrupted taste of the age. But from this time they have gone through many editions, though still they never appeared properly collated and arranged till 1816.[75]
They are, however, of great value. They consist of versions of all the Eclogues and two of the Georgics of Virgil, about thirty Odes of Horace, about forty Psalms, and a few passages from the Greek and Italian poets; all executed with freedom and spirit, and all in a genuinely Castilian style. His translations, however, seem to have been only in the nature of exercises and amusements. But though he thus acquired great facility and exactness in his versification, he wrote little. His original poems fill no more than about a hundred pages; but there is hardly a line of them which has not its value; and the whole, when taken together, are to be placed at the head of Spanish lyric poetry. They are chiefly religious, and the source of their inspiration is not to be mistaken. Luis de Leon had a Hebrew soul, and kindles his enthusiasm almost always from the Jewish Scriptures. Still he preserved his nationality unimpaired. Nearly all the best of his poetical compositions are odes written in the old Castilian measures, with a classical purity and rigorous finish before unknown in Spanish poetry, and hardly attained since.[76]
This is eminently the case, for instance, with what the Spaniards have esteemed the best of his poetical works: his ode, called “The Prophecy of the Tagus,” in which the river-god predicts to Roderic the Moorish conquest of his country, as the result of that monarch’s violence to Cava, the daughter of one of his principal nobles. It is an imitation of the Ode of Horace in which Nereus rises from the waves and predicts the overthrow of Troy to Paris, who, under circumstances not entirely dissimilar, is transporting the stolen wife of Menelaus to the scene of the fated conflict between the two nations. But the Ode of Luis de Leon is written in the old Spanish quintillas, his favorite measure, and is as natural, fresh, and flowing as one of the national ballads.[77] Foreigners, however, less interested in what is so peculiarly Spanish, and so full of allusions to Spanish history, may sometimes prefer the serener ode “On a Life of Retirement,” that “On Immortality,” or perhaps the still more beautiful one “On the Starry Heavens”; all written with the same purity and elevation of spirit, and all in the same national measure and manner.
A truer specimen of his prevalent lyrical tone, and, indeed, of his tone in much else of what he wrote, is perhaps to be found in his “Hymn on the Ascension.” It is both very original and very natural in its principal idea, being supposed to express the disappointed feelings of the disciples as they see their Master passing out of their sight into the opening heavens above them.
And dost them, holy Shepherd, leave
Thine unprotected flock alone,
Here, in this darksome vale, to grieve,
While thou ascend’st thy glorious throne?