Mrs. Hemans considered this poem as almost, if not altogether, the best of her works. She would sometimes say, that in proportion to the praise which had been bestowed upon others of her less carefully meditated and shorter compositions, she thought it had hardly met with its fair share of success: for it was the first continuous effort in which she dared to write from the fulness of her own heart—to listen to the promptings of her genius freely and fearlessly. The subject was suggested by a passage in one of the letters of Don Leucadio Doblado, and was wrought upon by her with that eagerness and fervor which almost _command_ corresponding results. I have heard Mrs. Hemans say, that the greater part of this poem was written in no more picturesque a retreat than a laundry, to which, as being detached from the house, she resorted for undisturbed quiet and leisure. When she read it, while in progress, to her mother and sister, they were surprised to tears at the increased power displayed in it. She was not prone to speak with self-contentment of her own works; but, perhaps, _the one_ favorite descriptive passage was that picture of a sea burial in the second canto. ... She lay a thing for earth's embrace, To cover with spring-wreaths. For earth's?—the wave That gives the bier no flowers, makes moan above her grave! On the mid-seas a knell!—for man was there,— Anguish and love, the mourner with his dead! A long, low, tolling knell—a voice of prayer— Dark glassy waters, like a desert spread,— And the pale shining Southern Cross on high, {612} Its faint stars fading from a solemn sky, Where mighty clouds before the dawn grew red:— Were these things round me? Such o'er memory sweep Wildly when aught brings back that burial of the deep. Then the broad lonely sunrise, and the plash Into the sounding waves!—around her head They parted, with a glancing moment's flash, Then shut—and all was still.... The whole poem, whether in its scenes of superstition—the Auto da Fe—the dungeon—the flight, or in its delineation of the mental conflicts of its hero—or in its forest pictures of the free west, which offer such a delicious repose to the mind, is full of happy thoughts and turns of expression. Four lines of peculiar delicacy and beauty recur to me as I write, too strongly to be passed by. They are from a character of one of the martyr sisters. And if she mingled with the festive train, It was but as some melancholy star Beholds the dance of shepherds on the plain, In its bright stillness present, though afar.