hours or in your dark hours than just this, which seems to have
been put providentially into your hands!

"The extracts from the 'Sacred Parnassus' in the Chronicle, which
reached me yesterday, are also excellent.

"For this and all, many and many thanks.

"Yours faithfully,
"HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

"Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Esq.".

From George Ticknor, Esq., the Historian of Spanish Literature.
"Boston, 16th December, 1861.

"In this point of view, your volume seems to me little less than
marvellous. If I had not read it--indeed, if I had not carefully gone
through with the "Devocion de la Cruz", I should not have believed it
possible to do what you have done. Titian, they say, and some others of
the old masters, laid on colours for their groundwork wholly different
from those they used afterwards, but which they counted upon to shine
through, and contribute materially to the grand results they produced.
So in your translations, the Spanish seems to come through to the
surface; the original air is always perceptible in your variations. It
is like a family likeness coming out in the next generation, yet with
the freshness of originality.

"But the rhyme is as remarkable as the verse and the translation; not
that you have made the asonante as perceptible to the English ear as it
is to the Spanish; our cumbersome consonants make that impossible. But
the wonder is, that you have made it perceptible at all. I think I
perceive your asonantes much as I do those of August Schlegel or Gries,
and more than I do those of Friederich Schlegel. But he was the first
who tried them, and, besides, I am not a German. Would it not be
amusing to have the experiment tried in French?"

From the Same.
"Boston, March 20, 1867.

"The world has claims on you which you ought not to evade; and, if the
path in which you walk of preference, leads to no wide popularity or
brilliant profits, it is, at least, one you have much to yourself, and
cannot fail to enjoy. You have chosen it from faithful love, and will
always love it; I suspect partly because it is your own choice, because
it is peculiarly your own".

From the Same.
"Boston, July 3, 1867.

"Considered from this point of view, I think that in your present volume
["Mysteries of Corpus Christi", or "Autos Sacramentales" of Calderon]
you are always as successful as you were in your previous publications
of the same sort, and sometimes more so; easier, I mean, freer,