For several centuries the poetry of Galicia lay as dead; there was practically no sign of life, and even her glorious past seemed to have sunk into oblivion. People even wondered, in the early years of the nineteenth century, how it could ever have come about that the _trovadors_ of the Middle Ages should have chosen her archaic dialect for their medium. But there was a sudden and wonderful change a few years later. Galicia woke out of her long sleep; she had found a poetess in Rosalia Castro. Rosalia’s sensitive and poetic mind was admirably adapted to interpret the beauties of Galicia; “her refined faculties surprise, by means of the secrets of language, the secrets of the soul.” Sometimes her verses are full of tender melancholy, at others they are penetrated with gentle irony, and now and again they reflect the innocent hilarity of childhood. As one of Rosalia’s own countrywomen has said, “If her tears are softened by smiles, her smiles in their turn are tempered by tears, and the one and the other are mingled to the sound of the _gaita_.”[205] By virtue of her selection and her delicate talent, Rosalia purged the Gallegan tongue of certain prosaic vulgarities which her precursor, the Cura de Fruime, and one or two of that poet’s contemporaries, had allowed to creep into it, and so her name has come to stand as a symbol of the renaissance of Galicia’s poetry, and she will always be regarded as the first poet to open a new era in the annals of her native province.[206] So far no other Gallegan poet of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries has approached Rosalia in individuality. Clear and distinct her poetic personality stands out from amongst all the rest; she has given the impulse, and others are already following in the path her genius has so clearly indicated, and a literary movement has been set on foot which may possibly terminate in a third Golden Age for Galicia.