It is obvious that Luis de Leon took a keen interest in all the real essentials of his art. It is no less obvious that he saw matters in their actual perspective, that he attached no undue importance to technique, as such, and that he gave no less weight to the choice of matter than to the choice of form. Luis de Leon was not incapable of metrical audacities: as when he divides into two separate words adverbs in _-mente_ occurring at the end of a line. This practice was audacious, but it was not an innovation. Juan de Almeida defended it by citing a host of precedents from other literatures and, had Almeida been a prophet, he might have foretold that this device was destined to be repeated hundreds of years later by that innovating genius Rubén Darío. But Almeida was not a prophet. His titles to remembrance are that he was learned, and that he may rank with Miguel Sanchez, with Alonso de Espinosa, and with Benito Arias Montano as among the least unsuccessful of Luis de Leon's followers. They often follow his lead with undeniable adroitness. Yet they never attain his incomparable concentration, his majestic vision of nature and his characteristic note of ecstatic aloofness. Nowhere is he more himself than in the immortal stanzas dedicated to Oloarte under the title of _Noche serena_ of which Churton has bequeathed us an English version which I will quote, though it gives but a far-off echo of the original's magic melody:
When nightly through the sky I view the stars their files unnumber'd leading, Then see the dark earth lie In deathlike trance, unheeding How Life and Time with those bright orbs are speeding:
Strong love and equal pain Wake in my heart a fire with anguish burning; The tear-drops fall like rain, Mine eyes to fountains turning, And my sad voice pours forth its tones of mourning:
O mansion of high state, Bright temple of bright saints in beauty dwelling, The soul, once born to mate With these, what force repelling Hath bound to earth, its light in darkness quelling?
What mortal disaccord Hath exiled so from Truth the mind unstable? Why of its blest reward Forgetful, lost, unable, Seeks it each shadowy fraud and guileful fable?
Man lies in slumber dead, Like one that of his danger hath no feeling, The while with silent tread Those restless orbs are wheeling, And, as they fly, his hours of life are stealing.