[76] In noticing the Hebrew temperament of Luis de Leon, I am reminded of one of his contemporaries, who possessed in some respects a kindred spirit, and whose fate was even more strange and unhappy. I refer to Juan Pinto Delgado, a Portuguese Jew, who lived long in Spain, embraced the Christian religion, was reconverted to the faith of his fathers, fled from the terrors of the Inquisition to France, and died there about the year 1590. In 1627, a volume of his works, containing narrative poems on Queen Esther and on Ruth, free versions from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the old national _quintillas_, and sonnets and other short pieces, generally in the Italian manner, was published at Rouen in France, and dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, then the all-powerful minister of Louis XIII. They are full of the bitter and sorrowful feelings of his exile, and parts of them are written, not only with tenderness, but in a sweet and pure versification. The Hebrew spirit of the author, whose proper name is Moseh Delgado, breaks through constantly, as might be expected. Barbosa, Biblioteca, Tom. II. p. 722. Amador de los Rios, Judios de España, Madrid, 1848, 8vo, p. 500. This is eminently the case, for instance, with what the Spaniards have esteemed the best of his poetical works: his ode, called “The Prophecy of the Tagus,” in which the river-god predicts to Roderic the Moorish conquest of his country, as the result of that monarch’s violence to Cava, the daughter of one of his principal nobles. It is an imitation of the Ode of Horace in which Nereus rises from the waves and predicts the overthrow of Troy to Paris, who, under circumstances not entirely dissimilar, is transporting the stolen wife of Menelaus to the scene of the fated conflict between the two nations. But the Ode of Luis de Leon is written in the old Spanish _quintillas_, his favorite measure, and is as natural, fresh, and flowing as one of the national ballads.[77] Foreigners, however, less interested in what is so peculiarly Spanish, and so full of allusions to Spanish history, may sometimes prefer the serener ode “On a Life of Retirement,” that “On Immortality,” or perhaps the still more beautiful one “On the Starry Heavens”; all written with the same purity and elevation of spirit, and all in the same national measure and manner. [77] It is the eleventh of Luis de Leon’s Odes, and may well bear a comparison with that of Horace (Lib. I. Carm. 15) which suggested it. A truer specimen of his prevalent lyrical tone, and, indeed, of his tone in much else of what he wrote, is perhaps to be found in his “Hymn on the Ascension.” It is both very original and very natural in its principal idea, being supposed to express the disappointed feelings of the disciples as they see their Master passing out of their sight into the opening heavens above them.