Come, sudden as the lightning-ray,
When skies are calm and air is still;
E'en from the silence of its way,
More sure to strike where'er it will.
Such let thy secret coming be,
Lest warning make thy summons vain,
And joy to find myself with thee
Call back life's ebbing tide again."
A great lyric poet, his lyrics are mostly included in his plays. One ballad, supposed to be a description of himself, written at a lady's request, is often quoted, and has been well Englished by Mr. Norman MacColl; it is, however, unauthentic, being due to a Sevillan contemporary, Carlos Cepeda y Guzmán.[28] The earliest play printed with Calderón's name is El Astrólogo fingido (1632), and from 1633 onwards collected editions of his works were published; but he had no personal concern in these issues, which so presented him that, as he protested, he could not recognise himself. Though he printed a volume of autos in 1676, he was so indifferent as to the fate of his secular plays that he never troubled to collect them. Luckily, in 1680 he drew up a list of his pieces for the Duque de Veragua, the descendant of Columbus, and upon this foundation Vera Tasis constructed a posthumous edition in nine volumes. Roughly speaking, we possess one hundred and twenty formal plays, and some seventy autos, with a few entremeses of no great account.
Calderón has been fortunate in death as in life; for though his vogue never quite equalled that of his great predecessor, Lope, it proved far more enduring. From Lope's death to the close of the seventeenth century, Calderón was chief of the Spanish stage; and, though he underwent a temporary eclipse in the eighteenth century, his sovereignty was restored in the nineteenth by the enthusiasm of the German Romantics. He has suffered more than most from the indiscretion of admirers. When Sismondi pronounced him simply a clever playwright, "the poet of the Inquisition," he was no further from the truth than the extravagant Friedrich Schlegel, who proclaimed that "in this great and divine master the enigma of life is not merely expressed, but solved": thus placing him above Shakespeare, who (so raved the German) only stated life's riddle without attempting a solution. James the First once said to the ambassador whom Ben Jonson called "Old Æsop Gondomar":—"I know not how, but it seems to be the trade of a Spaniard to talk rodomontade." It was no less the trade of the German Romantic, who mistook lyrism for scenic presentation. Nor were the Germans alone in their enthusiasm. Shelley met with Calderón's ideal dramas, read them "with inexpressible wonder and delight," and was tempted "to throw over their perfect and glowing forms the grey veil of my own words." The famous speech of the Spirit replying, in the Mágico Prodigioso, to Cyprian's question, "Who art thou, and whence comest thou?" has become familiar to every reader of English literature:—