assertion.  Luis de Leon is not ‘finicking’.  Withal he is a master of his art.  Retrograde as we may perhaps think him in some matters, he was on the side of the reformers in the matter of metrics.  He was a partisan of Boscan’s innovating methods:  so much might be expected from a man of his period.  It is to be noted that, in his best poems, he shows a decided preference for liras, a form apparently invented by Bernardo Tasso before it was transplanted to Spain by Garcilasso de la Vega.  Luis de Leon was of opinion that those who violate poetry, using it for purposes of a meretricious kind, deserved punishment as public corrupters of two most sacred things:  poetry and morals.  It is one of the curious ironies of art that the measure which the seductive Garcilasso used for amatory purposes should have appealed to Luis de Leon as the vehicle most suited to enraptured chants and hymns of philosophic meditation.

It is obvious that Luis de Leon took a keen interest in all the real essentials of his art.  It is no less obvious that he saw matters in their actual perspective, that he attached no undue importance to technique, as such, and that he gave no less weight to the choice of matter than to the choice of form.  Luis de Leon was not incapable of metrical audacities:  as when he divides into two separate words adverbs in _-mente_ occurring at the end of a line.  This practice was audacious, but it was not an innovation.  Juan de Almeida defended it by citing a host of precedents from other literatures and, had Almeida been a prophet, he might have foretold that this device was destined to be repeated hundreds of years later by that innovating genius Ruben Dario.  But Almeida was not a prophet.  His titles to remembrance are that he was learned, and that he may rank with Miguel Sanchez, with Alonso de Espinosa, and with Benito Arias Montano as among the least unsuccessful of Luis de Leon’s followers.  They often follow his lead with undeniable adroitness.  Yet they never attain his incomparable concentration, his majestic vision of nature and his characteristic note of ecstatic aloofness.  Nowhere is he more himself than in the immortal stanzas dedicated to Oloarte under the title of Noche serena of which Churton has bequeathed us an English version which I will quote, though it gives but a far-off echo of the original’s magic melody: 

        When nightly through the sky
    I view the stars their files unnumber’d leading,
        Then see the dark earth lie
        In deathlike trance, unheeding
    How Life and Time with those bright orbs are speeding: 

        Strong love and equal pain
    Wake in my heart a fire with anguish burning;
        The tear-drops fall like rain,
        Mine eyes to fountains turning,
    And my sad voice pours forth its tones of mourning: 

        O mansion of high state,
    Bright temple of bright saints in beauty dwelling,
        The soul, once born to mate
        With these, what force repelling
    Hath bound to earth, its light in darkness quelling?