Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/150

 would like to be Horatian, summons nymphs to disport with him in the shade, and abounds in florid terms, without thought.

Carpio is inspired more or less by Biblical subjects, as Pharaoh and Belshazzar. In De Castro, Zaragoza, Gustave Baz, and Cuenca are found charming conceits, of pensive cast, and bits of description of a limpid purity. Jewellers in words they may be called at their best, affiliated to the Venetian school. The argument of Zaragoza's "Armonias" (Harmonies) is briefly as follows: "When the flowers are dead, and spring is over, the swallows take their flight; and when again the flowers of spring adorn the mead, they, too, return, bringing blessings on their wings.

"But when the illusions depart and leave behind them only the thorns of the passions, in vain, we invoke and wait for them to return. The illusions, the swallows of the heart, return, alas! never."

So Gustave Baz, brooding in the sere winter over some heavy sorrow, reflects upon the return of spring. But the very contrast of its joyousness, the fresh rippling of the brooks and melody of the birds, will but render his sadness the heavier. "Then most keenly," he laments, "will break forth my grief. Then weightiest will the air be laden with my sighs."

The gem of the Lyra Mexicana is undoubtedly a certain fugitive sonnet, "A Rosario," by an unfortunate young man, Acuña, who ended by taking his own life. The poem expresses the charming ideals in love and the bitterness of its disappointment, in a youth of fine and sensitive nature. It has a poignancy and realism which have, perhaps, never been surpassed. He returned from a long journey, as the story is told, and found his betrothed the wife of another. The shock proving unen-