A man bowed down with age and embittered by sorrowful and useless experience, shuts in despair a book he was reading, and mournfully convinced of the barrenness of learning, falls asleep. Death then presents itself, and intones a hymn inviting him to the peace of the grave. With pleasure he feels his benumbed limbs growing stiff with cold, and is enjoying himself in the enervation of his spirit, when Immortality suddenly rises up before him and sings another hymn in opposition to that of Death, and like that also offering herself to the man about to die.
The election is immediate; he chooses Immortality, and is re-endowed with youth. The song of this deity, however, does not lead to the immortality of the spirit, but of the material part of man, and it is that he receives. The image of death is invested with melancholy beauty; it is soft and gentle; that which is desired when, free from prejudices, we feel the heart worn and the soul discontented. The immortality that rises over the pale front of death, effaces it with a magnificent lustre. "It is impossible," says Ros de Olano, who has written the prologue to this beautiful poem, "to approach, by any words of ours whatever, to the luxuriousness of thought, of expression, and of knowledge displayed in this sublime description, the most happy perhaps yet presented in the Spanish language." Grand, extended and immense is the field which the poet has displayed to trace out a course for his hero, and the variety of tones he employs are like the face of the world, over which he has to range. As the character is developed, the hero, with the body of a man and the soul of a child, is placed in situations equally original and interesting, and the whole scheme is one which gave full scope to the writer for an unlimited work, even if he had been permitted to live to the utmost period of human existence.
