A few short year’s, and in the lonely cave
Where sleeps the Zegri maid, is Hamet’s grave.
Sever’d in life, united in the tomb--
Such, of the hearts that loved so well, the doom!
Their dirge, of woods and waves th’ eternal moan;
Their sepulchre, the pine-clad rocks alone.
And oft beside the midnight watch-fire’s blaze,
Amidst those rocks, in long-departed days,
(When freedom fled, to hold, sequester’d there,
The stern and lofty councils of despair,)
Some exiled Moor, a warrior of the wild,
Who the lone hours with mournful strains beguiled,
Hath taught his mountain-home the tale of those
Who thus have suffer’d, and who thus repose.
[86] The terrors occasioned by this sudden excitement of popular
feeling seem even to have accelerated Abo Abdeli’s capitulation.
“Aterrado Abo Abdeli con el alboroto y temiendo no ser ya el Dueño
de un pueblo amotinádo, se apresuró á concluir una capitulation, la
menos dura que podia obtenir en tan urgentes circumstancias, y ofrecio
entregor á Granada el dia seis de Enero.”--_Paseos en Granada_, vol. i.
p. 298.
[87] The oaken cross, carried by Pelagius in battle.
[88] See Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid, in which that warrior is
frequently styled, “he who was born in happy hour.”
[89] “Moreover, when the Miramamolin brought over from Africa against
King Don Alfonso, the eighth of that name, the mightiest power of
the misbelievers that had ever been brought against Spain, since the
destruction of the kings of the Goths, the Cid Campeador remembered
his country in that great danger; for the night before the battle was
fought at the Navas de Tolosa, in the dead of the night, a mighty sound
was heard in the whole city of Leon, as if it were the tramp of a great
army passing through; and it passed on to the royal monastery of St
Isidro, and there was a great knocking at the gate thereof, and they
called to a priest who was keeping vigils in the church, and told him
that the captains of the army whom he heard were the Cid Ruydiez, and
Count Ferran Gonzalez, and that they came there to call up King Don
Fernando the Great, who lay buried in that church, that he might go
with them to deliver Spain. And on the morrow that great battle of the
Navas de Tolosa was fought, wherein sixty thousand of the misbelievers
were slain, which was one of the greatest and noblest battles ever won
over the Moors.”--Southey’s _Chronicle of the Cid_.
[90] The name of Andalusia, the _region of evening_, or _of the west_,
was applied by the Arabs not only to the province so called, but to the
whole peninsula.
[91] “En este dia, para siempre memorable, los estandartes de la Cruz,
de St Jago, y el de los Reyes de Castilla se tremoláran sobre la torre
mas alta, llamada de _la Vela_; y un exercito prosternado, inundandose
en lagrimas de gozo y reconocimiento, asistio al mas glorioso de los
espectaculos.”--_Paseos en Granada_, vol. i. p. 299.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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