is human body:
Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated
in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the
splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour
of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are
interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse
becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on
its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the whole.

Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine
inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency
in form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves
to the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the
movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His _Rosario
de Sonetos Liricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the finest
sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this volume--more
at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on events of local
politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic side of
Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that sonnet
xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_; from a
suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for knowledge is
"not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose "thought is
therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight
love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself, which of
course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated under
many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which truly do
justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it
contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that
sombre and fateful poem _Nihil Novum sub Sole_ (cxxiii.), which defeats
its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration.

So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the
question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably
the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at
all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their
source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined
artists have no doubt enriche