song as beautiful as the sentiment that inspired it."

Antonio devoted himself to his duties during the day and pursued his
studies with eagerness during the night. What he suffered from
home-sickness the reader can easily imagine. All through his later works
are scattered reminiscences of those unhappy years in Madrid, when his
memory fondly turned to the mountains and cherry-groves of his beloved
Encartaciones.[1] Often dreaming of the country, which, he says, is his
perpetual dream, he imagined the moment in which God would permit him to
return to the valley in which he was born. "When this happens, I say to
myself, my brow will be wrinkled and my hair gray. The day on which I
return to my native valley will be a festal day, and on crossing the
hill from which I can behold the whole valley, I shall hear the bells
ringing for high mass. How sweetly will resound in my ears those bells
that so often rilled my childhood with delight! I shall enter the
valley, my heart beating, my breathing difficult and my eyes bathed with
tears of joy. There will be, with its white and sonorous belfry, the
church where the holy water of baptism was poured upon the brows of my
parents and my own; there will be the walnut and chestnut trees beneath
whose shade we danced on Sunday afternoons; there will be the wood where
my brothers and I looked for birds' nests and made whistles out of the
chestnut and walnut bark; there, along the road, will be the apple trees
whose fruit my companions and I knocked off with stones when we went to
school; there will be the little white house where my grand-parents, my
father, my brothers and I were born; there will be all that does not
feel or breathe. But where will be, my God, all those who with tears in
their eyes bade me farewell so many years ago? I shall follow the valley
down: I shall recognize the valley, but not its inhabitants. Judge
whether there will be among sorrows a greater sorrow than mine! The
people gathered in the portico of the church waiting for mass to begin
will look over the wall along the road, and others will look out of the
windows, all to see the stranger pass. And they will not know me, and I
shall not know them, for those children and those youths and those old
men will not be the old men nor the youths nor the children whom I left
in my native valley. I shall follow sadly the valley down. 'All that has
felt,' I shall exclaim, 'has changed or died. What is it that preserves