"If Carolina Coronado had, through modesty, sent her productions from Estremadura to Madrid under the name of a person of the other sex, it would still have been difficult for intelligent readers to persuade themselves that they were written by a man, or at least, considering their graceful sweetness, purity of tone, simplicity of conception, brevity of development, and delicate and particular choice of subject, we should be constrained to attribute them to one yet in his early youth, whom the imagination would represent as ingenuous, innocent, and gay, who had scarce ever wandered beyond the flowery grove or pleasant valley where his cradle was rocked, and where he has been lulled to sleep by the sweetest songs of Francisea de la Torre, Garcilaso, and Melendez."
The author of the Pájaro Perdido, according to a memoir of her by Angel Fernandez de los Rios, was born at Almendralejo, in Estremadura, in 1823. At the age of nine years she began to steal from sleep, after a day passed in various lessons, and in domestic occupations, several hours every night to read the poets of her country, and other books belonging to the library of the household, among which are mentioned, as a proof of her vehement love of reading, the "Critical History of Spain," by the Abbé Masuden, "and other works equally dry and prolix." She was afterward sent to Badajoz, where she received the best education which the state of the country, then on fire with a civil war, would admit. Here the intensity of her application to her studies caused a severe malady, which has frequently recurred in after-life. At the age of thirteen years she wrote a poem entitled La Palma, which the author of her biography declares to be worthy of Herrera, and which led Espronceda, a poet of Estremadura, a man of genius, and the author of several translations from Byron, whom he resembled both in mental and personal characteristics, to address her an eulogistic sonnet. In 1843, when she was but twenty years old, a volume of her poems was published at Madrid, in which were included both that entitled La Palma and the one I have given in this note. To this volume Hartzenbusch, in his admiration for her genius, prefaced an introduction.
The task of writing verses in Spanish is not difficult. Rhymes are readily found, and the language is easily moulded into metrical forms. Those who have distinguished themselves in this literature have generally made their first essays in verse. What is remarkable enough, the men who afterward figured in political life mostly began their career as the authors of madrigals. A poem introduces the future statesman to the public, as a speech at a popular meeting introduces the candidate for political distinctions in this country. I have heard of but one of the eminent Spanish politicians of the present time, who made a boast that he was innocent of poetry; and if all that his enemies say of him be true, it would have been well both for his country and his own fame, if he had been equally innocent of corrupt practices. The compositions of Carolina Coronado, even her earliest, do not deserve to be classed with the productions of which I have spoken, and which are simply the effect of inclination and facility. They possess the mens divinior.
In 1852 a collection of poems of Carolina Coronado was brought out at Madrid, including those which were first published. The subjects are of larger variety than those which prompted her earlier productions; some of them are of a religious cast, others refer to political matters. One of them, which appears among the "Improvisations," is an energetic protest against erecting a new amphitheatre for bull-fights. The spirit in all her poetry is humane and friendly to the best interests of mankind.
Her writings in prose must not be overlooked. Among them is a novel entitled Sigea, founded on the adventures of Camoëns; another entitled Jarilla, a beautiful story, full of pictures of rural life in Estremadura, which deserves, if it could find a competent translator, to be transferred to our language. Besides these there are two other novels from her pen, Paquita and La Luz del Tejo. A few years since appeared, in a Madrid periodical, the Semanario, a series of letters written by her, giving an account of the impressions received in a journey from the Tagus to the Rhine, including a visit to England. Among the subjects on which she has written, is the idea, still warmly cherished in Spain, of uniting the entire peninsula under one government. In an ably-conducted journal of Madrid, she has given accounts of the poetesses of Spain, her contemporaries, with extracts from their writings, and a kindly estimate of their respective merits.
Her biographer speaks of her activity and efficiency in charitable enterprises, her interest in the cause of education, her visits to the primary schools of Madrid, encouraging and rewarding the pupils, and her patronage of the escuela de parvules, or infant school at Badajoz, established by a society of that city, with the design of improving the education of the laboring class.
It must have been not long after the publication of her poems, in 1852, that Carolina Coronado became the wife of an American gentleman, Mr. Horatio J. Perry, at one time our Secretary of Legation at the Court of Madrid, afterward our Chargé d'Affaires, and now, in 1863, again Secretary of Legation. Amid the duties of a wife and mother, which she fulfils with exemplary fidelity and grace, she has neither forgotten nor forsaken the literary pursuits which have given her so high a reputation.
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THE RUINS OF ITALICA.
The poems of the Spanish author, Francisco de Rioja, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, are few in number, but much esteemed. His ode on the Ruins of Italica is one of the most admired of these, but in the only collection of his poems which I have seen, it is said that the concluding stanza, in the original copy, was deemed so little worthy of the rest that it was purposely omitted in the publication. Italica was a city founded by the Romans in the south of Spain, the remains of which are still an object of interest.