Whenever the several nations of the earth which have achieved their deliverance from misrule and tyranny shall point, as they each may, to the fair women who have taken active part in the cause of liberty, and by their smiles and services have contributed in no measured degree to the great objects of national defence and deliverance, it will be with a becoming and just pride only that the Colombians shall point to their virgin martyr, commonly known among them as La Pola, the Maid of Bogota. With the history of their struggle for freedom her story will always be intimately associated; her tragical fate, due solely to the cause of her country, being linked with all the touching interest of the most romantic adventure. Her spirit seemed to be woven of the finest materials. She was gentle, exquisitively sensitive, and capable of the most true and tender attachments. Her mind was one of rarest endowments, touched to the finest issues of eloquence, and gifted with all the powers of the improvisatrice, while her courage and patriotism seem to have been cast in those heroic moulds of antiquity from which came the Cornelias and Deborahs of famous memory. Well had it been for her country had the glorious model which she bestowed upon her people been held in becoming homage by the race with which her destiny was cast—a race masculine only in exterior, and wanting wholly in that necessary strength of soul which, rising to the due appreciation of the blessings of national freedom, is equally prepared to make, for its attainment, every necessary sacrifice of self; and yet our heroine was but a child in years—a lovely, tender, feeble creature, scarcely fifteen years of age. But the soul grows rapidly to maturity in some countries, and in the case of women, it is always great in its youth, if greatness is ever destined to be its possession.
Doña Apolenaria Zalabariata—better known by the name of La Pola—was a young girl, the daughter of a good family of Bogota, who was distinguished at an early period, as well for her great gifts of beauty as of intellect. She was but a child when Bolivar first commenced his struggles with the Spanish authorities, with the ostensible object of freeing his country from their oppressive tyrannies. It is not within our province to discuss the merits of his pretensions as a deliverer, or of his courage and military skill as a hero. The judgment of the world and of time has fairly set at rest those specious and hypocritical claims, which, for a season, presumed to place him on the pedestal with our Washington. We now know that he was not only a very selfish, but a very ordinary man—not ordinary, perhaps, in the sense of intellect, for that would be impossible in the case of one who was so long able to maintain his eminent position, and to succeed in his capricious progresses, in spite of inferior means, and a singular deficiency of the heroic faculty. But his ambition was the vulgar ambition, and, if possible, something still inferior. It contemplated his personal wants alone; it lacked all the elevation of purpose which is the great essential of patriotism, and was wholly wanting in that magnanimity of soul which delights in the sacrifice of self, whenever such sacrifice promises the safety of the single great purpose which it professes to desire. But we are not now to consider Bolivar, the deliverer, as one whose place in the pantheon has already been determined by the unerring judgment of posterity. We are to behold him only with those eyes in which he was seen by the devoted followers to whom he brought, or appeared to bring, the deliverance for which they yearned. It is with the eyes of the passionate young girl, La Pola, the beautiful and gifted child, whose dream of country perpetually craved the republican condition of ancient Rome, in the days of its simplicity and virtue; it is with her fancy and admiration that we are to crown the ideal Bolivar, till we acknowledge him, as he appears to her, the Washington of the Colombians, eager only to emulate the patriotism, and to achieve like success with his great model of the northern confederacy. Her feelings and opinions, with regard to the Liberator, were those of her family. Her father was a resident of Bogota, a man of large possessions and considerable intellectual acquirements. He gradually passed from a secret admiration of Bolivar to a warm sympathy with his progress, and an active support—so far as he dared, living in a city under immediate and despotic Spanish rule—of all his objects. He followed with eager eyes the fortunes of the chief, as they fluctuated between defeat and victory in other provinces, waiting anxiously the moment when the success and policy of the struggle should bring deliverance, in turn, to the gates of Bogota. Without taking up arms himself, he contributed secretly from his own resources to supplying the coffers of Bolivar with treasure, even when his operations were remote—and his daughter was the agent through whose unsuspected ministry the money was conveyed to the several emissaries who were commissioned to receive it. The duty was equally delicate and dangerous, requiring great prudence and circumspection; and the skill, address and courage with which the child succeeded in the execution of her trusts, would furnish a frequent lesson for older heads and the sterner and the bolder sex.
La Pola was but fourteen years old when she obtained her first glimpse of the great man in whose cause she had already been employed, and of whose deeds and distinctions she had heard so much. By the language of the Spanish tyranny, which swayed with iron authority over her native city, she heard him denounced and execrated as a rebel and marauder, for whom an ignominious death was already decreed by the despotic viceroy. This language, from such lips, was of itself calculated to raise its object favorably in her enthusiastic sight. By the patriots, whom she had been accustomed to love and venerate, she heard the same name breathed always in whispers of hope and affection, and fondly commended, with tearful blessings, to the watchful care of Heaven. She was now to behold with her own eyes this individual thus equally distinguished by hate and homage in her hearing. Bolivar apprised his friends in Bogota that he should visit them in secret. That province, ruled with a fearfully strong hand by Zamano, the viceroy, had not yet ventured to declare itself for the republic. It was necessary to operate with caution; and it was no small peril which Bolivar necessarily incurred in penetrating to its capital, and laying his snares, and fomenting insurrection beneath the very hearth-stones of the tyrant. It was to La Pola's hands that the messenger of the Liberator confided the missives that communicated this important intelligence to her father. She little knew the contents of the billet which she carried him in safety, nor did he confide them to the child. He himself did not dream the precocious extent of that enthusiasm which she felt almost equally in the common cause, and in the person of its great advocate and champion. Her father simply praised her care and diligence, rewarded her with his fondest caresses, and then proceeded with all quiet despatch to make his preparations for the secret reception of the deliverer. It was at midnight, and while a thunder-storm was raging, that he entered the city, making his way, agreeably to previous arrangement, and under select guidance, into the inner apartments of the house of Zalabariata. A meeting of the conspirators—for such they were—of head men among the patriots of Bogota, had been contemplated for his reception. Several of them were accordingly in attendance when he came. These were persons whose sentiments were well known to be friendly to the cause of liberty, who had suffered by the hands, or were pursued by the suspicions of Zamano, and who, it was naturally supposed, would be eagerly alive to every opportunity of shaking off the rule of the oppressor. But patriotism, as a philosophic sentiment, to be indulged after a good dinner, and discussed phlegmatically, if not classically, over sherry and cigars, is a very different sort of thing from patriotism as a principle of action, to be prosecuted as a duty, at every peril, instantly and always, to the death, if need be. Our patriots at Bogota were but too frequently of the contemplative, the philosophical order. Patriotism with them was rather a subject for eloquence than use. They could recall those Utopian histories of Greece and Rome which furnish us with ideals rather than facts, and sigh for names like those of Cato, and Brutus, and Aristides. But more than this did not seem to enter their imaginations as at all necessary to assert the character which it pleased them to profess, or maintain the reputation which they had prospectively acquired for the very commendable virtue which constituted their ordinary theme. Bolivar found them cold. Accustomed to overthrow and usurpation, they were now slow to venture property and life upon the predictions and promises of one who, however perfect in their estimation as a patriot, had yet suffered from most capricious fortunes. His past history, indeed, except for its patriotism, offered but very doubtful guarantees in favor of the enterprise to which they were invoked. Bolivar was artful and ingenious. He had considerable powers of eloquence—was specious and persuasive; had an oily and bewitching tongue, like Balial; and if not altogether capable of making the worse appear the better cause, could at least so shape the aspects of evil fortune, that, to the unsuspicious nature, they would seem to be the very results aimed at by the most deliberate arrangement and resolve. But Bolivar, on this occasion, was something more than ingenious and persuasive, he was warmly earnest, and passionately eloquent. In truth, he was excited much beyond his wont. He was stung to indignation by a sense of disappointment. He had calculated largely on this meeting, and it promised now to be a failure. He had anticipated the eager enthusiasm of a host of brave and noble spirits ready to fling out the banner of freedom to the winds, and cast the scabbard from the sword forever. Instead of this, he found but a little knot of cold, irresolute men, thinking only of the perils of life which they should incur, and the forfeiture and loss of property which might accrue from any hazardous experiments. Bolivar spoke to them in language less artificial and much more impassioned than was his wont. He was a man of impulse rather than of thought or principle, and, once aroused, the intense fire of a southern sun seemed to burn fiercely in all his words and actions. His speech was heard by other ears than those to which it was addressed. The shrewd mind of La Pola readily conjectured that the meeting at her father's house, at midnight, and under peculiar circumstances, contemplated some extraordinary object. She was aware that a tall, mysterious stranger had passed through the court, under the immediate conduct of her father himself. Her instinct divined in this stranger the person of the deliverer, and her heart would not suffer her to lose the words, or if possible to obtain, to forego the sight of the great object of its patriotic worship. Beside, she had a right to know and to see. She was of the party, and had done them service. She was yet to do them more. Concealed in an adjoining apartment—a sort of oratory, connected by a gallery with the chamber in which the conspirators were assembled—she was able to hear the earnest arguments and passionate remonstrances of the Liberator. They confirmed all her previous admiration of his genius and character. She felt with indignation the humiliating position which the men of Bogota held in his eyes. She heard their pleas and scruples, and listened with a bitter scorn to the thousand suggestions of prudence, the thousand calculations of doubt and caution with which timidity seeks to avoid precipitating a crisis. She could listen and endure no longer. The spirit of the improvisatrice was upon her. Was it also that of fate and a higher Providence? She seized the guitar, of which she was the perfect mistress, and sung even as her soul counseled and the exigency of the event demanded. Our translation of her lyrical overflow is necessarily a cold and feeble one.
It was a dream of freedom—
A mocking dream, though bright—
That showed the men of Bogota
All arming for the fight;
All eager for the hour that wakes
The thunders of redeeming war,
And rushing forth with glittering steel,
To join the bands of Bolivar.
My soul, I said, it cannot be
That Bogota shall be denied
Her Arismendi, too—her chief
To pluck her honor up, and pride;
The wild Llanero boasts his braves
That, stung with patriot wrath and shame,
Rushed redly to the realm of graves,
And rose, through blood and death, to fame.
How glads mine ear with other sounds,
Of freemen worthy these, that tell!
Ribas, who felt Caraccas' wounds,
And for her hope and triumph fell;
And that young hero, well beloved,
Giraldat, still a name for song;
Piar, Marino, dying soon,
But, for the future, living long.
Oh! could we stir with other names,
The cold, deaf hearts that hear us now,
How would it bring a thousand shames,
In fire, to each Bogotian's brow!
How clap in pride Grenada's hands;
How glows Venezuela's heart;
And how, through Cartagena's lands,
A thousand chiefs and hero's start.
Paez, Sodeno, lo! they rush,
Each with his wild and Cossack rout;
A moment feels the fearful hush,
A moment hears the fearful shout!
They heed no lack of arts and arms,
But all their country's perils feel,
And sworn for freedom, bravely break,
The glitering legions of Castile.
I see the gallant Roxas grasp
The towering banner of her sway;
And Monagas, with fearful clasp,
Plucks down the chief that stops the way;
The reckless Urdaneta rides,
Where rives the earth the iron hail;
Nor long the Spanish foeman bides,
The stroke of old Zaraza's flail.