Thirteen poems were written, Molina's being accepted by unanimous vote. Darío was among the contestants, and he was the first in acknowledging the superiority of Molina's work." (F. Molina)

Enroute to Río, Molina visited Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon, and, it is thought, returned via New York. While in Paris, he wrote the preface to a novel by Turcios: Prefacio de la Novela ANNABEL LEE de Froylan Turcios.

Molina married, without the consent of her parents, a beautiful and distinguished girl. Two children, a boy and a girl, were born to this union. The daughter, Señorita Bertha Molina, is now living in Tegucigalpa. The young wife, made unhappy, presumably by the irregular life of Molina, soon died broken-hearted, accepting death as a godsend. Her name, Dolores Hinestroza, seemed a prophecy of her sad career. After her death, Molina wrote a beautiful elegy in her memory, to which reference is made elsewhere in this paper. In 1908, he married a second wife, por poder, with whom he could have lived only a short time, if ever at all.

Regarding his death Sevilla says: "Molina died in San Salvador the first of November, 1908. His death was to some extent shrouded in mystery. It is said by some that he put an end to his life. According to others he had been drinking a good deal and decided to stop or rather to obtain a moment of lucidity by the use of morphine; as he had never used the drug he went to a friend of his, a 'dope fiend', who used on Molina the same dose he was accustomed to use on himself. thereby causing his

death.

Those who hold the first theory assert that Molina asked several friends to inject him with morphine and in this way succeeded in causing his death."

He died in a bar-room at Aculhuaca, a little village one mile from San Salvador, November 2, 1908. Some three years later Hernán Rosales and the poet Alvarez Magaña visited the scene of his death. They found behind the bar a beautiful maid, who, upon mention of Molina, began weeping, saying that excepting her first lover she had never loved anyone as she loved Molina. Then escorting them into the rear room, among piles of empty bottles and abandoned furniture, she pointed out the table upon which Molina's head rested when he breathed his last.*

The above facts about the life of Juan Ramón Molina will enable us to understand his writings better. Conversely, his writings are distinctly subjective and, like a powerful reflector, throw much light on the life of the man. Among the poems which are revelations of his life are Autobiografía, Después que Muera, Madre Melancolía and Los Cuatro Bueyes. His Autobiografía, (Autobiography) is given in full as follows:

*Nosotros, Sept., 1920, p. 229.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*

Born in the blue depths of the Honduran mountains,

I detest the cities.

A group of cabins lost in the remote solitudes

Is more to my liking.

I am a savage, intractable and tactiturn,
Whom the urban discipline enervates.
And I live as the lion and the bear,
A prisoner-dreaming in the cavern.

My childhood was like a smiling garden
Where fleeing from the joys of my youth-
I wandered sorrowful and pensive,

So early taken captive by the fever of illusion,

Deaf to the clamorous outcry

Of many forgotten companions,

Whom the cold, implacable sickle of black fate,
Was garnering without mercy.

All fell in the dark grave;

Life for them was a sad delusion,

And my heart bulging with bitterness,

I saw myself, ere long, in utter solitude.

What has become of that one

Whose graceful head was like the sun?

The Herculean youth who jested at my skill in the combat?

The charming youth of angelic mien?

*The Spanish text for this and other longer translations from the Poesías will be found in the Appendix.

Him who brought down the highest nest?

The most merry and the most deceitful? The clown?

For the sad ones oblivion wrote,

On the wandering wind, an epitaph . . . !

For them, death was a good fairy!

They did not know sorrow.

Gloomy old age cast no ashes on their heads,

Nor bent their sturdy youth!

From my infancy I pondered,

Mournfully, the thought of death.

Melancholy was my best beloved in this little world,

And continues yet to be.

I felt in my soul a natural desire to sing.

Along the side of the road,

I found a lyre-it was not that of Orpheus

And I obey the command of destiny,

So blindly, that tomorrow-when,

Like a fugitive, life flees from me

Perhaps I shall celebrate my sad bethrothal with death Singing madrigals.

I have not been a good man. Nor yet evil.

There is in me a strange duality.

I have much of sanity, something of madness,

Much of the abyss and something of the lofty mountain.

To some, I am an arrogant monster;

To others, very humble and most cordial:
To old Job I would have said-Brother,
Give me your sores and your dung-hill.

A life sufficiently contradictory

Of pleasure and of sorrow, of hatred and of wooing,
Has agitated my being: such is the chronicle

Of my cordiality and of my haughtiness.

Deadly joys and terrible sorrows,

All felicity and every misfortune,

Explorations through the remote heavens,

Enormous accumulation of reading;

Prodigal waste in sensuality, quaffing nepenthe,

The mind tortured in cilice,

The soul like a running sore,

The victim of premature vices;

The wretchedness of mediocrity; a yearning for glory

That arrives too late: being arrayed
For battle and ready for victory,
And being, in spite of that, a failure.

All conspires to make me horribly sad,
Him who ascends the mental heights,

And who passes-disdainful and indifferent-
Among the arrogant crowds.

Alas my early youth! The certain,

The only youth, that which is divine!

"It remains afar, the pcor wolf, dead,"

Assassinated by my own javelin.

When I look at myself in the mirror, what a change!

I am not able to recognize myself,

I have in my eyes such a tired look,

Something of the fear of one who sees a yawning chasm.