Once meditate, and see
That fix'd accord in wondrous variance given,
The mighty harmony
Of courses all uneven,
Wherein each star keeps time and place in heaven.
Who can behold that store
Of light unspent, and not, with very sighing,
Burst earth's frail bonds, and soar,
With soul unbodied flying,
From this sad place of exile and of dying?
There dwelleth sweet Content;
There is the reign of Peace; there, throned in splendour,
As one pre-eminent,
With dove-like eyes so tender,
Sits holy Love,—honour and joy attend her.
There is reveal'd whate'er
Of Beauty thought can reach; the source internal
Of purest Light, that ne'er
To darkness yields; eternal
Bloom the bright flowers in clime for ever vernal.
There would my spirit be,
Those quiet fields and pleasant meads exploring,
Where Truth immortally,
Her priceless wealth outpouring,
Feeds through the blissful vales the souls of saints adoring.
The fact that the original is cast in the lira form would compel one to assign this composition to a date not earlier than 1542, when Garcilasso's poems were first published. Nothing, however, could be more remote from Garcilasso's nebulous half-pagan melancholy; we are no less distant from the pseudonymous nymphs of Cetina and Francisco de la Torre: the elegant Amaryllis of the one, the elusive Filis of the other, though destined to be re-incarnated by a tribe of later poets, find no place in these stately numbers. Luis de Leon does not emulate Alcázar's epigrammatic wit, nor Herrera's Petrarchan sweetness, nor Ercilla's tumultuous rhetoric. He has an individuality all his own, the moral purpose of the man is wedded to the poet's art in such wise that he strikes a note individual and completely new in Spanish literature—a note rarely heard in any literature till we catch its strain in the verses of him who tells us that
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
In Luis de Leon, as in Wordsworth, art is raised to a hieratic dignity: both have a splendid simplicity, a most lofty expression of sublime meditation—qualities rare everywhere in every age, and rarest of all in the flamboyant, if gloomy, Spain of the sixteenth century.
Luis de Leon has his weak points. He does not attain to the angelic melody of St. John of the Cross. He is apt to be indifferent to sheer beauty of form; though he often reaches it, this success seems with him to be a happy accident. Lucidity is not his main object; though he uses simple terms, his immense range of knowledge tempts him at whiles to indulge in allusions which it might tax all the ingenuity of commentators to explain. Commentators of Luis de Leon have a sufficiently heavy task before them in reconstructing the text of his poems—the heavier because the originals no longer exist. Sr. de Onís has given us some idea of the problems to be solved.[275] Whatever flaws are revealed in Luis de Leon's manner, he is nearly always vital, nearly always has something elevating, illuminating and beautiful to say. As a human being, too, he is not above criticism. There is an unpleasant savour in the story that he asked Antonio Perez to let him have the Chrysostom manuscript which he proposed to translate in Paris, the profits to be divided. We need not believe this perhaps calumnious little tale. Antonio Perez is open to suspicion of being an assassin and a traitor; he may also have been untruthful. Luis de Leon is not a candidate for canonization. He was no icicle of perfection. He was something vastly more interesting than a chill intellectual: a man ardent, austere, conscious of resplendent intellectual faculties, perhaps a little arrogant when off his guard, incautious but wary, individualistic but self-sacrificing, emotional, sensitive, reticent: a mass of conflicting qualities blended, unified and held in subjection by sheer strength of will, fortified by a professional discipline, deliberately embraced and rigorously followed. Add to this that he had in a supreme degree the creative impulse, an irrepressible instinct for self-expression. It is not strange that the self-expression of a personality so fine, so complex, so rich, so rare, should produce the series of compositions which entitle Luis de Leon to rank among the very greatest of Spanish poets, and beside the most glorious figures in the history of any literature. He stands a little apart from the rest of Spanish poets in a splendid solitude which befits him; he must perforce be solitary, dwelling as he most often does at altitudes inaccessible to ordinary mortals.