Canción de Elvira. This Gutiérrez calls the "song of the American Ophelia."
[152.]—Andrade: see note to p. 151.
[18.] Á celebrar las bodas, to be the bride.
[153.—3.] The Argentines, especially, seem to take delight in calling themselves a Latin, rather than a Spanish, race. This may be due to the fact that fully one third of the population of Argentine is Italian. Both Juan Valera and Menéndez y Pelayo have chided the Argentines for speaking of themselves as a raza latino-americana, instead of hispano-americana.
[15.] arcano, secret, seems to have the force here of a secret ark, or secret sanctuary, which is broken open that its secrets may be disclosed.
[154.—6-10.] These lines refer, of course, to the Christian religion, spoken of symbolically as an altar, which has replaced the heterogeneous pagan cults of ancient Rome, and which the Spaniards first brought to America.
[11.] ciclopeas: note the omission of the accent on o that the word may rime with ideas.
[155.—5.] Tequendama: see in the Vocab. Several Colombian poets, including Don José Joaquín Ortiz and Doña Agripina Montes del Valle, have written odes to this famous waterfall. See Menéndez y Pelayo, Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Am., II; and Parnaso colombiano, II, Bogotá, 1887.
[17-18.] A revolutionary hero, Antonio Ricaurte (b. 1786), blew up the Spanish powder magazine on the summit of a hill near San Mateo, and lost his life in the explosion. See Mateo in Vocab.