And lo! Creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind?
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"
This is as characteristic as his Oda á Carlos III. or the remorseful Castilian lines on Resigned Desire, penned within a year of his death. A very similar talent was that of Blanco's friend, Alberto Lista (1775-1848), also a Canon of Seville Cathedral, a most accomplished singer, whose golden purity of tone compensates for a deficient volume of voice and an affected method. But, save for such a fragment of impassioned, plangent melody as the poem Á la Muerte de Jesús, Lista is less known as a poet than as a teacher of remarkable influence. His Lecciones de Literatura Española did for Spain what Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets did for England, and his personal authority over some of the best minds of his age was almost as complete in scope as it was gentle in exercise and excellent in effect.
The most famous of his pupils was José de Espronceda (1810-42), who came under Lista at the Colegio de San Mateo, in Madrid, where the boy, who was in perpetual scrapes through idleness and general bad conduct, attracted the rector's notice by his extraordinary poetic precocity. Through good and evil report Lista held by Espronceda to the last, and was perhaps the one person who ever persuaded him from a rash purpose. At fourteen Espronceda joined a secret society called Los Numantinos, which was supposed to work for liberty, equality, and the rest. The young Numantine was deported to a monastery in Guadalajara, where, on the advice of Lista (who himself contributed some forty octaves), he began his epical essay, El Pelayo. Like most other boys who have begun epics, Espronceda left his unfinished, and, though the stanzas that remain are of a fine but unequal quality, they in no way foreshadow the chief of the romantic school.