Thy secrets scan, thy smooth, round pebbles count!
How, without malice murmuring, glides thy current!
O sweet simplicity of days gone by!
Thou shun'st the haunts of man, to dwell in limpid fount!"
Two hundred sonnets in Lope's Rimas are thought to have been issued separately in 1602: in any case, they were published that year at the end of a reprint of the Angélica. They include much of the writer's sincerest work, earnest in feeling, skilful and even distinguished as art. One sonnet of great beauty—To the Tomb of Teodora Urbina—has led Ticknor into an amusing error often reproduced. He cites from it a line upon the "heavenly likeness of my Belisa," notes that this name is an anagram of Isabel (Lope's first wife), and pronounces the performance a lament for the poet's mother-in-law. The Latin epitaph which follows it contains a line,—
"Exactis nondum complevit mensibus annum,"—
showing that the supposed mother-in-law died in her first year. Manifestly the sonnet refers to the writer's daughter, and, as always happens when Lope speaks from his paternal heart, is instinct with a passionate tenderness.
To 1604 belong the five prose books of the Peregrino en su patria, a prose romance of Pánfilo's adventures by sea and land, partly experienced and partly contrived; but it is most interesting for the four autos which it includes, and for its bibliographical list of two hundred and thirty plays already written by the author. His quenchless ambition had led him to rival Ariosto in the Angélica: in the twenty cantos of his Jerusalén Conquistada he dares no less greatly by challenging Tasso. Written in 1605, the Jerusalén was withheld till 1609. Styled a "tragic epic" by its creator, it is no more than a fluent historico-narrative poem, overlaid with embellishments of somewhat cheap and obvious design. In 1612 appeared the Four Soliloquies of Lope de Vega Carpio: his lament and tears while kneeling before a crucifix begging pardon for his sins. These four sets of redondillas with their prose commentaries were amplified to seven when republished (1626) under the pseudonym of Gabriel Padecopeo, an obvious anagram. The deaths of Lope's wife and of his son Carlos inspired the Pastores de Belén, a sacred pastoral of supreme simplicity, truth, and beauty—as Spanish as Spain herself—which contains one of the sweetest numbers in Castilian. The Virgin lulls the Divine Child with a song in Verstegan's manner, which Ticknor has rendered to this effect:—
"Holy angels and blest,
Through those palms as ye sweep