here pure and immaculate the sentiments which I inspired?' And then some
village-woman will sing one of those songs in which I enclosed the
deepest feelings of my soul, and on hearing her my heart will want to
leap from my breast, and I shall fall on my knees, and, if emotion and
sobs do not stifle my voice, I shall exclaim, 'Holy and thrice holy,
blessed and thrice blessed, poetry which immortalizes human sentiment!'"

Antonio after a time left his relative's shop to enter another in the
same business, from which he was relieved by the owner's financial
difficulties. He then determined to devote himself to literature, and
became a writer for the papers. In 1852 he published _Libro de Cantares_
(_Book of Songs_), which at once made his name a household word
throughout Spain. He tells us that most of the poems in it were composed
mentally while dreaming of his native country and wandering about the
environs of Madrid, "wherever the birds sing and the people display
their virtues and their vices, for the noble Spanish people have a
little of everything." He warns his readers not to expect from him what
he cannot give them: "Do not seek in this book erudition or culture or
art. Seek recollections and feeling, and nothing more. Fifteen years ago
I left my solitary village: these fifteen years, instead of singing
under the cherry trees of my native country, I sing in the midst of the
Babylon which rises on the banks of the Manzanares; and,
notwithstanding, I still amuse myself with counting from here the trees
that shade the little white house where I was born, and where, God
willing, I shall die: my songs still resemble those of fifteen years
ago. What do I understand of Greek or Latin, of the precepts of Horace
or of Aristotle? Speak to me of the blue skies and seas, of birds and
boughs, of harvests and trees laden with golden fruit, of the loves and
joys and griefs of the upright and simple villagers, and then I shall
understand you, because I understand nothing more than this."

These poems are what the author calls them, nothing more--pure and
simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and
griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the
simple Spanish _asonante_, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the
vowel rhyme called _asonante_.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit
of melancholy, very different from the _Weltschmerz_ of Heine, with some
of whose lyrics the Spanish poe