attraction which is wanting in those of Luis de Leon; but on the other hand, the latter are the more rich in that natural kind of poetry, which may be regarded as the overflowing of a pure soul, elevated to the loftiest regions of moral and religious idealism.[229] Luis de Leon himself published a collection of his poetic works, divided into three books. The first, contains his original poems--the second, translations from some of the ancient classics--and the third, metrical versions of several of the psalms, and some parts of the book of Job. The reader who peruses the poems of Luis de Leon, which are all odes, in the spirit in which the author wrote them, will fancy himself transported to a better world. No furious zeal disturbs the gentle piety that pervades them; no extravagant metaphor destroys the harmony of the ideas and expression; and no discordant accent breaks the pleasing melody of the rhythm. The idea of the perishableness of all earthly things,[230] is united with smiling pictures of nature.[231] The imitations of Horace are only introduced to aid the poetic light in which the poet views those objects which were peculiarly interesting to his contemporaries.[232] One of Luis de Leon’s most celebrated odes is the _Noche Serena_, but the concluding stanzas do not correspond with the beauty of the commencement.[233] In the ode to Felipe Ruiz, the ardent aspiration for heavenly truth is very picturesquely expressed.[234] But the exalted inspiration and tender enthusiasm in which Luis de Leon so widely departs from Horace, are most prominently evinced in his ode on Heavenly Life (_De la Vida del Cielo_). Here his fancy is bold without launching into extravagant metaphors. What an etherial effulgence glows through his lyric picture of “the soft bright region, the meadow of holiness, never blighted by frost, nor withered by the sun’s rays;--where the good shepherd, his head crowned with blossoms of purple and white, without either sling or staff, leads his beloved flock to the sweet pasture covered with everblooming roses;--where the shepherd, reclining in the shade at noon, blows his heavenly pipe, whose feeblest tone, should it descend on the ear of the poet, would transform his whole soul to love.”[235] The ode in which the genius of the Tagus prophecies to King Roderick the misfortunes of Spain, is more in Horace’s style, and possesses a very happy uniformity of character. In some other imitations of a similar kind, the fancy of the pious poet willingly descends from the heavenly regions. The poems contained in the first part of the collection are few in number. Those which Luis de Leon himself inserted, amount only to twenty-seven, and among them is an indifferent elegy, and a cancion in the Italian style of not much greater merit. Several other compositions, which he seems to have rejected, have been recently printed from manuscripts.[236]