want thee to show them and prove that we say true; so, as thou livest, pray sit down and sing that ballad about thy love that thy uncle the prebendary made thee, and that was so much liked in the town."
"With all my heart," said the young man, and without waiting for any more pressing he seated himself on the trunk of a felled oak, and tuning his rebeck, presently began with right good grace to sing to these words.
ANTONIO'S BALLAD. [1]
Thou dost love me well, Olalla;
Well I know it, even though
Love's mute tongues, thine eyes, have never
By their glances told me so.
For I know my love thou knowest,
Therefore thine to claim I dare:
Once it ceases to be secret.
Love need never feel despair.
True it is, Olalla, sometimes
Thou hast all too plainly shown
That thy heart is brass in hardness,
And thy snowy bosom stone.
- ↑ Antonio's ballad is in imitation of a species of popular poetry that occupies nearly as large a space as the romantic and historical ballads in the old romanceros. These gay, naïve, simple lays of peasant life and love are as thoroughly national and peculiar to Spain as the historical ballads themselves, and in every way present a striking contrast to the artificial pastoral sonnets and canciones of Italian importation. The imitation of this kind of poetry was a favorite pastime with the poets of the Spanish Augustan age, and strange to say the poet who showed the lightest touch and brightest fancy in these compositions, and caught most happily the simplicity and freshness of the originals, was Gongora, whose name is generally associated with poetry the exact opposite of this in every particular. Cervantes apparently valued himself more upon his sonnets and artificial verses; a preference regretted, I imagine, by most of his readers. This ballad has been hardly treated by the translators. The language and measures used by Shelton and Jervas are about as well adapted to represent a Spanish popular lyric as a dray-horse to draw a pony-chaise. The measure of the original is the ordinary ballad measure, an eight-syllable trochaic, with the assonant rhyme in the second and fourth lines. The latter peculiarity I have made no attempt to imitate here, but examples of it will be found farther on.
