and dismally.

"They too have their nostalgias," said someone sentimentally.

"What they of the old time did not have," came a deep voice from under
a bowler hat, "was the leisure to be sad. The sweetness of
putrefaction, the long remembering of palely colored moods; they had
the sun, we have the colors of its setting. Who shall say which is
worth more?"

The man next to me had got to his feet. "A night like this with a moon
like this," he said, "we should go to the ancient quarter of the
witches."

Gravel crunched under our feet down the road that led out of moonlight
into the darkness of the glen--to _San Millan de las brujas_.

* * * * *

You cannot read any Spanish poet of to-day without thinking now and
then of Ruben Dario, that prodigious Nicaraguan who collected into his
verse all the tendencies of poetry in France and America and the Orient
and poured them in a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, into
the thought of the new generation in Spain. Overflowing with beauty and
banality, patched out with images and ornaments from Greece and Egypt
and France and Japan and his own Central America, symbolist and
romantic and Parnassian all at once, Ruben Dario's verse is like those
doorways of the Spanish Renaissance where French and Moorish and
Italian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest
routine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rare
beauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out of
the impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. And
that spark can be said--as truly as anything of the sort can be
said--to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation in
Spanish poetry. Of course the poets have not been content to be
influenced by the outside world only through Dario. Baudelaire and
Verlaine had a very large direct influence, once the way was opened,
and their influence succeeded in curbing the lush impromptu manner of
romantic Spanish verse. In Antonio Machado's work--and he is beginning
to be generally considered the central figure--there is a restraint and
terseness of phrase rare in any poetry.

I do not mean to imply that Machado can be called in any real sense a
pupil of either Dario or Verlaine; rather one would say that in a
generation occupied largely in more or less unsuccessful imitation of
these poets, Machado's poetry stands out as particularly original and