| “’Tis well that thou hast done, |
| Most noble and most right, |
| To answer honor's call, my son, |
| For Fatherland to fight.” |
The fourth of the four poets of "Cuatro Laudes" was Felipe Lopez de Brinas, who drew his best themes from nature, and who addressed his best poems to his wife.
One of the most popular poets in the period just preceding and during the Ten Years' War was José Fornaris, who in his "Cantos de Siboney" related many legends of the Cuban aborigines, some of them actual traditions but most of them invented by himself. A contemporary who essayed similar themes with almost equal success was Juan Cristobal Napoles Fajardo. Another, Miguel Teurbe de Tolon, devoted himself to legends and ballads not of the aborigines but of the Cuban people of European ancestry. Tolon was an intense patriot, and for that cause suffered exile. For some years he lived in New York, where he was efficiently active as the secretary of the Cuban Revolutionary Junta in that city.
But perhaps above all others the poet—we might say, the Tyrtaeus—of the revolution was Joaquin Lorenzo Luaces, though he did not live to see the beginning of the war which he did so much to provoke. Luaces, who was born in 1826 and died in 1867, was a devoted Greek scholar, and took Greek poetry for his model. For that reason many have thought that his writings were somewhat academic and artificial. There is however in his poems an exquisite finish surpassed by no other Cuban writer, while many of them reach a height of inspiration which few others have equalled. There was in them, moreover, an irresistible call to Cuban patriotism, which had vast effect in rousing the nation for the Ten Years' War. One of his most stirring lyrics was on the Greek War of Independence, entitled "The Fall of Missolonghi":
| To arms, ye Greeks! Missolonghi falls! |
| And Ibrahim conquers her soldiers brave. |
| But the Moslem finds within those walls |
| Corpses of Greeks, but never one slave! |
JOAQUIN LORENZO LUACES
Lyric, dramatic and patriotic poet, Joaquin Lorenzo Luaces was born in Havana in 1826, and was educated at the University of that city. His themes as a poet were largely those of the great events of the day, or of history, such as the Fall of Missolonghi, the Death of Lincoln, and the Laying of the Atlantic Cable. Many of his poems were patriotic appeals disguised in classic forms. He died in 1867.
This passionate call to patriots to do battle to the death against tyrants was addressed to the Greeks, thousands of miles away, and the tyrants against whom it raged were Moslem Turks, hated by all true Spaniards; wherefore the Spanish censor permitted it to be published freely in Cuba. But every Cuban patriot read in it "Cubans" for "Greeks" and "Spaniards" for "Moslems." Luaces was the author of a number of meritorious dramas.