In some incidents of the closing scenes of these memorable lives there is a curious parallelism. Lope de Vega and Cervantes lived and died in the same street, now called the Calle de Cervantes, and were buried in the same convent of the street now called Calle de Lope de Vega. In this convent each had placed a beloved daughter, the fruit of an early and unlawful passion. Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan. Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when, and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition. But the mystic espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the eldest son of God--the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey Lope--were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event celebrated in endless rhymes by the genteel poets of the period. Rarely has a lovelier sacrifice been offered on the altar of superstition. The father, who had been married twice before he entered the priesthood, and who had seen the folly of errant loves without number, twitters in the most innocent way about the beauty and the charm of his child, without one thought of the crime of quenching in the gloom of the cloister the light of that rich young life. After the lapse of more than two centuries we know better than he what the world lost by that lifelong imprisonment. The Marquis of Mo-lins, director of the Spanish Academy, was shown by the ladies of the convent in this year of 1870 a volume of manuscript poems from the hand of Sor Marcela, which prove her to have been one of the most vigorous and original poets of the time. They are chiefly mystical and ecstatic, and full of the refined and spiritual voluptuousness of a devout young heart whose pulsations had never learned to beat for earthly objects. M. de Molins is preparing a volume of these manuscripts; but I am glad to present one of the seguidillas here, as an illustration of the tender and ardent fantasies of virginal passion this Christian Sappho embroidered upon the theme of her wasted prayers:-- Let them say to my Lover That here I lie! The thing of his pleasure, His slave am I. Say that I seek him Only for love, And welcome are tortures My passion to prove. Love giving gifts Is suspicious and cold; I have _all,_ my Beloved, When thee I hold. Hope and devotion The good may gain, I am but worthy Of passion and pain. So noble a Lord None serves in vain,-- For the pay of my love Is my love's sweet pain.