HORE HISPANICÆ. No. II. The Ruins of the Castle of Cervantes, and the Fall of Roderick and Spain. MR NORTH.-While glancing some time since over the pages of your Thirtyninth Number, I was attracted by some translated specimens of the romantic Minstrelsy of Spanien Dem schönen Land des Weins und der Gesänge,* ushered in, by the bye, with a preamble of your own, written in enviable prose. Having RODD's and DEPPING'S Collections by me, I was induced to look into the latter, and now send you the result of my meditations therein. Dublin, 7th December, 1820. Yours, &c. THE RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF ST CERVANTES. YE hoary towers, sacred to Cervantes' holy name, No gay and streamer'd minarets your airy summit erown'd, In vain the engine high was rear'd to threaten and assail, A time there was, as records tell, when, throned in solemn state, Now, shapeless as the rugged rocks upon your naked hill, When the merry vintage-time is past, and its sounds have died away. Albeit in guise uncouth are couch'd the verses I have writ, Full many a maid,-whose blooming charms are like a summer sky, T. C. *GOETHE'S Faust. I have been, in rendering these two last lines, necessitated to deviate from the sense of the original, by the opposition of a most uncompromising pun. And-like the almond-branch, which pluck'd in spring's maturing hour, Should such e'er stray beside your hill, exulting in her pride, Yon silent halls, where once the tuneful minstrel had his place, Let her behold in you the fate of earthly pomp That even the little vagrant lock which trembles o'er her brow, Lest, slumb'ring on the downy couch Delirium strews with flow'rs, When dim and deathly is the eye, and its liquid lustre gone, And the days of youth, and the days of bliss, and the days of love are flown, THE FALL OF RODERICK AND SPAIN. The illicit amours of Roderick and Cava, or Florinda, and their subsequent tribulation and contrition, have been celebrated by many ancient bards of Spain, whom time has rendered anonymous, and living bards of Britain, whom no time will ever render so. The following poem might have suggested the plan of the celebrated ballad of DE LEON, which has been so successfully imitated by SOUTHEY, HERBERT, RUSSEL, and others. O turn your eyes, Don Roderick-O turn your eyes and see, *The Spanish word desengano, which implies disenthralment from some agreeable delusion, is one of those fixtures of a language which defy translation. The word I have employed is not the coinage of my own mint, but was originally (to use his own expression) "hazarded" by LAWSON, the ingenious publisher of the Relics of Melodino, “as more" equivalent to desengano than disappointment." The sons of Spain are up in arms against the sons of Spain; And the hostile blood of sire and son runs curdling on the plain; For the land of the vine, and the land of song, and the land of high emprize, O, what avail'd the gests of yore-the deeds of the olden time? The good is gone-the bad remains-it ne'er shall pass away. For the land of the vine, and the land of song, and the land of high emprize, IF I might, without incurrring the charge of nationality, introduce a translation from the German as an ingredient of my Hora Hispanicæ,, I should be inclined to subjoin the following little ditty. I shall probably screen myself from the above imputation, by offering it merely in the form of a note upon the "Song for the Morning of the Day of St John the Baptist," to which such ample justice has been done by my predecessor. This will also, perhaps satisfy the scruples of your officer, whose duty it is to search my bale of goods, outvoiced as Spanish, and who might otherwise be inclined to denounce the commodity as contraband. I picked up the original one evening of last July, in the beautiful village of Blankanese, on the Elbe, where the ungenial zephyrs kept me for a day or two, closely pent up in a land which I loved much, but yearning to return to one which I loved more. I transcribed it from an almanack lent me by my host, and in which the name of the author is givenFREDERICK STRICKER. It exhibits a parallel superstition to that which is alluded to in the production of your former correspondent, and pertaining to another country. The superstitious influence of the Baptist is felt at all points of the compass. Fires are duly lighted after sunset upon the " eve of St John," on the mountains which lie to the south of Dublin, (and which embellish the vicinity of that city, with a variety of romantic scenery, rarely to be met within four miles of a metropolis ;) and your correspondent recollects to have been stopped, when a boy, on his return with a party from an excursion into the county of Wicklow, by a line of country cars drawn across the road, at the village of Stillorgan, the owners of which had adopted this mode of exacting" something towards the bon-fire." These localities will not be deemed irrelevant to the pages of an "IRISH MAGAZINE.' THE ST JOHN'S-WORT. The young maid stole thro' the cottage door, And blush'd as she sought the plant of pow'r ;- And sparkled and shone And soon has the young maid her love-knot tied. * See No. XLIV. page 197, column 1, line 29. + The glow-worm is denominated in German Johanniswürmchen. With noiseless tread To her chamber she sped, Where the spectral moon her white beams shed:- And when a year was past away, And sparkled and shone Thro' the night of St John, As they clos'd the cold grave o'er the maid's cold clay. The following note is added in the German :-" According to a provincial custom in Lower Saxony, every young girl plucks a sprig of St John's Wort on mid-summer night, and sticks it into the wall of her chamber. Should it, owing to the dampness of the wall, retain its freshness and verdure, she may reckon upon gaining a suitor in the course of the year; but, if it droop, the popular belief is, that she also is destined to pine and wither away.” ON POETIC INSPIRATION. We have frequently heard poets of eminence lament their inability to call up their wonted powers of poetic composition, and even of poetic thought, when summoned, by any sudden emergence, to the exercise of their mighty vocation. A landscape of surpassing beauty-an event of individual moral interest, or of national and universal import, would seem, to the by-standers, calculated to awaken the muse from her deepest slumber. But it is all in vain. The landscape may lie in all its expanse of loveliness before him-the tale of woe or of wonder may be told in his ear, and his heart may throb higher than that of the ordinary mortal; but he breathes no accents correspondent to his lofty emotions-his thoughts, he imagines, lie too deep for tears, or are too exalted for mirth, and he suffers the event to pass by him into oblivion, Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung. The reason of all this will be apparent, if we attentively consider the causes and the occasions of poetic inspiration. It will be granted, we venture to suppose, on reflection, that we only think at all, in preference to, or to supply the place of corporeal exertion; and that we only think poetically in preference to, or to supply the place of corporeal enjoyment. Reason ing may be considered the employment of the mind, as the indulgence of the imagination is its amusement. Man perpetually oscillates between the attractions of his mental and corporeal faculties; and the more he indulges the one, the more is he necessarily restricted in his enjoyment of the other. His finite powers are too limited-his expanse of perception is too narrow to comprehend, at the same time, all the gratifications which the faculties of his double nature can produce, or he would approach nearer in felicity to those mighty beings who precede him in the scale of intelligence and fruition. Love alone, of all our pleasures, unites, in a considerable degree, the functions of our moral and physical powers; and hence, love is the most delightful of our sensations. From this fact, then, that the simultaneous enjoyment of the delights flowing from these two distinct, though intimately connected, sources of pleasure, is incompatible with the frame and constitution of our nature, may be explained the phenomenon we have been pointing out to observation. We will suppose the poet to be reclining in an arbour on a calm summer's evening a landscape, in all the luxuriance of verdure, spread out before his eye-a stream murmuring at his feet -the birds, in a neighbouring grove, chaunting their vespers-the fragrance of wild-flowers over his head-and, above all, the soft mellow light of evening, clothing every surrounding object in hues of tenfold beauty. What scene can be imagined better calculated to arouse his poetic energies? Yet poetry, at least good poetry, in such a situation, most certainly he will not produce. Or, if he should make a successful effort, it will only be by foregoing his corporeal gratification, and will be but remotely, if at all, connected with the scene before him. If he gives nature the rein, his enjoyment will be entirely corporeal; and the intellect, with a kind of suspended exertion, will be only so far in activity as it may assist in administering to the gratification of the senses. In truth, we never resort to the inward prospects of the mind, till those without are deficient in interest or in splendour; for realities would be the sole objects of our attention, were they as beautiful as the forms of fancy. Or, suppose him placed amid wilder and more romantic sceneryamid forests, and mountains, and lakes, and cataracts. Here again, he finds nothing, in his own mind, surpassing the magnificent prospect around him; his soul spurns at the shadows of the imagination, while a still loftier reality is towering before his eyes; and he takes the shortest way to his gratification by dwelling, bodily, and without mental reserve or interruption, on the unimaginable and indescribable grandeur of external nature. It is only when absence, lapse of time, or (which is more intimately connected with our argument) an incapacity or temporary distaste for physical enjoyment, has sent him back in imagination to the scene with which he was then so enraptured, that he learns to consider it as a fit subject on which to exercise his poetical powers. His passions, which were then in their highest state of excitement, are now in repose; and his judgment, which was then in abeyance, is now at hand to guide and correct his imagination. And the scene itself, which then paralyzed his discriminating powers by the oppressive intenseness of its reality, is now softened down, like every thing past, with tender and shadowy recollections. Poetry, the most natural, and, therefore, the most pleasing kind of it-Sir Walter Scott's poetry for instance-is not a direct ebullition of the feelings, but a description of them-it is a history of recollections. It is the language of passion revised by the judgment; not the foam that rides on the wave, but the mound thrown up by its perpetual tossing. That poetry, and of the noblest kind, may be written while the mind is in a state of violent excitement, Lord Byron's is a striking instance. However, even in this case, most poets will prefer the actual enjoyment to the description of it; and wait till the storm has subsided, before they attempt to sketch a history of the effects it has produced. But all corporeal gratification must, during such a process, be singularly excluded; mental excitement, and mental labour, must so occupy and absorb the faculties, as not to leave a single feeling connected with self, beyond the simple consciousness of material existence. THE AYRSHIRE LEGATEES: RESPONSIVE NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS. We have been exceedingly surprised at a letter which we received soon after the publication of our last number, complaining, with great severity, of an alleged liberty that we have taken with many respectable characters; and treating the whole that we have published respecting the Pringle family as an ingenious but impertinent fiction. In his notion, Mr A. B. is not singular; an impudent and illiterate person in the townhead of Irvine, had already assumed the same view of the subject, and railed at us in very ill set terms, for the freedom with which his ancient and venerable native town (from which, we suppose, he has never strayed) had been used by us in our adaptation of Mr M'Gruel's contributions to the purposes of our Magazine. To such addresses VOL. VIII. 2Z |