sidering their graceful sweetnoss, purity of tone, simplicity of conception, brevity of development, and delicate and particular choice of subject, we should be constrained to attribute them to one yet in his early youth, whom the imagination would represent as ingenuous, innocent and gay, who had scarce ever wandered beyond the flowery grove or pleasant valley where his cradle was rocked, and where he had been hulled to sleep by the sweetest songs of Francisco de la Torre, Garcilaso and Melendez."
The author of the Pajaro Perdido, according to a memoir of her by Angel Fernandez de los Rios, was born at Almendralejo, in Estremadura, in 1828. At the age of nine years she began to steal from sleep, after a day passed in various lessons, and in domestic occupations, several hours every night to read the poets of her country, and other books belonging to the library of the household, among which is mentioned as a proof of her vehement love of reading, the Critical History of Spain, by the Abbé Masuden, "and other works equally dry and prolix." She was afterwards sent to Badajoz, where she received the best education which the state of the country, then on fire with a civil war, would admit. Here the intensity of her application to her studies caused a severe malady, which has frequently recurred
