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And swift an arrow cleaved its way
To his stern heart! One piercing neigh
Arose, and, on the dead man's plain,
The rider grasps his steed again.

TRANSLATIONS

[Don Jorge Manrique, the author of the following poem,

flourished in the last half of the fifteenth century. He followed the profession of arms, and died on the field of battle. Mariana, in his History of Spain, makes honorable mention of him, as being present at the siege of C'clés; and speaks of him as “a youth of estimable qualities, who in this war gave brilliant proofs of his valor. He died young ; and was thus cut off from long exercising his great virtues, and exhibiting to the world the light of his genius, which was already known to fame.” He was mortally wounded in a skirmish near Cañavete, in the year 1479.

The name of Rodrigo Manrique, the father of the poet, Conde de Paredes and Maestre de Santiago, is well known in Spanish history and song. He died in 1476; according to Mariana, in the town of Uclés; but, according to the poem of his son, in (caña. It was his death that callet forth the poem upon which rests the literary reputation of the younger Manrique. In the language of his historian, “Don Jorge Manrique, in an elegant Ode, full of poetic beauties, rich embellishments of genius, and high moral reflections, mourned the death of his father as with a funeral hymn." This praise is not exaggerated. The poem is a model in its kind. Its conception is solemn and beautiful ; and, in accordance with it, the style moves on, - calm., dignified, and majestic.]

COPLAS DE MANRIQUE

FROM THE SPANISH

O

LET the soul her slumbers break,

Let thought be quickened, and awake; Awake to see How soon this life is past and gone, And death comes softly stealing on, How silently !

Swiftly our pleasures glide away,
Our hearts recall the distant day
With many sighs;
The moments that are speeding fast
We heed not, but the past, — the past,
More highly prize.

Onward its course the present keeps,
Onward the constant current sweeps,
Till life is done ;
And, did we judge of time aright,
The past and future in their flight
Would be as one.

3

VOL. IV.

D

Let no one fondly dream again,
That Hope and all her shadowy train
Will not decay;
Fleeting as were the dreams of old,
Remembered like a tale that 's told,
They pass away.

Our lives are rivers, gliding free
To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
The silent grave!
Thither all earthly pomp and boast
Roll, to be swallowed up and lost
In one dark wave.

Thither the mighty torrents stray,
Thither the brook pursues its way,
And tinkling rill.
There all are equal ; side by side
The poor man and the son of pride
Lie calm and still.

I will not here invoke the throng
Of orators and sons of song,
The deathless few;
Fiction entices and deceives,
And, sprinkled o'er her fragrant leaves,

o Lies poisonous dew.

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