the love of God in the love of Earth after the manner of the
sufi of Persia. Eventually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing with
the sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of the
tortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona
journalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as could
only be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. In
Maragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of the
peasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the passionate
metaphor of Lull.

Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems:

At sunset time
drinking at the spring's edge
I drank down the secrets
of mysterious earth.

Deep in the runnel
I saw the stainless water
born out of darkness
for the delight of my mouth,

and it poured into my throat
and with its clear spurting
there filled me entirely
mellowness of wisdom.

When I stood straight and looked,
mountains and woods and meadows
seemed to me otherwise,
everything altered.

Above the great sunset
there already shone through the glowing
carmine contours of the clouds
the white sliver of the new moon.

It was a world in flower
and the soul of it was I.

I the fragrant soul of the meadows
that expands at flower-time and reaping-time.

I the peaceful soul of the herds
that tinkle half-hidden by the tall grass.

I the soul of the forest that sways in waves
like the sea, and has as far horizons.

And also I was the soul of the willow tree
that gives every spring its shade.

I the sheer soul of the cliffs
where the mist creeps up and scatters.

And the unquiet soul of the stream
that shrieks in shining waterfalls.

I was the blue soul of the pond
that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer.

I the soul of the all-moving wind
and the humble soul of opening flowers.

I was the height of the high peaks...

The clouds caressed me with great gestures
and the wide love of misty spaces
clove to me, placid.

I felt the delightfulness of springs
born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers;
and in the ample quietude of horizons
I felt the reposeful sleep of storms.

And when the sky opened about me
and the sun laughed on my green planes
people, far off, stood still al