These are among the most picturesque passages in the poem. But it is throughout striking and original. It is, too, no less national, Christian, and loyal. It breathes everywhere the true Castilian spirit, such as the old chronicles represent it amidst the achievements and disasters of the Moorish wars; and has very few traces of an Arabic influence in its language, and none at all in its imagery or fancies. The whole of it, therefore, deserves to be read, and to be read in the original; for it is there only that we can obtain the fresh impressions it is fitted to give us of the rude but heroic period it represents: of the simplicity of the governments, and the loyalty and true-heartedness of the people; of the wide force of a primitive religious enthusiasm; of the picturesque state of manners and daily life in an age of trouble and confusion; and of the bold outlines of the national genius, which are often struck out where we should least think to find them. It is, indeed, a work which, as we read it, stirs us with the spirit of the times it describes; and as we lay it down and recollect the intellectual condition of Europe when it was written, and for a long period before, it seems certain, that, during the thousand years which elapsed from the time of the decay of Greek and Roman culture, down to the appearance of the “Divina Commedia,” no poetry was produced so original in its tone, or so full of natural feeling, picturesqueness, and energy.[23] [23] The change of opinion in relation to the Poema del Cid, and the different estimates of its value, are remarkable circumstances in its history. Bouterwek speaks of it very slightingly,--probably from following Sarmiento, who had not read it,--and the Spanish translators of Bouterwek almost agree with him. F. v. Schlegel, however, Sismondi, Huber, Wolf, and nearly or quite all who have spoken of it of late, express a strong admiration of its merits. There is, I think, truth in the remark of Southey (Quarterly Review, 1814, Vol. XII. p. 64): “The Spaniards have not yet discovered the high value of their metrical history of the Cid, as a poem; they will never produce any thing great in the higher branches of art, till they have cast off the false taste which prevents them from perceiving it.” Of all poems belonging to the early ages of any modern nation, the one that can best be compared with the Poem of the Cid is the Nibelungenlied, which, according to the most judicious among the German critics, dates, in its present form at least, about half a century after the time assigned to the Poem of the Cid. A parallel might easily be run between them, that would be curious.