senderos busca;
Las huellas de unos pies ensangrentados
Sobre la roca dura;
Los despojos de un alma hecha jirones
En las zarzas agudas;
Te diran el camino
Que conduce a mi cuna.[2]

?Adonde voy? El mas sombrio y triste
De los paramos cruza;
Valle de eternas nieves y de eternas
Melancolicas brumas.
En donde este una piedra solitaria
Sin inscription alguna,
Donde habite el olvido,
Alli estara mi tumba?[3]

[Footnote 1: This poem is composed of hendecasyllabic verses,
mostly of the first class, and of heptasyllabic verses. Notice the
_esdrujulo_ ending the 1st verse. The even verses have the same
assonance throughout.]

[Footnote 2: "Read in the light of what we know of his long
struggle, his frail physical health, his sensitive temper, his
crushing double defeat at the hands of death, these somber verses
have an individual, personal note, hardly present, perhaps, in the
love-poems, with all their passionate beauty." Mrs. Ward, _A
Spanish Romanticist_, Macmillan Magazine, February, 1883, p, 319.]

[Footnote 3: "He used to dream, he tells us, in his boyish
visions, of a marble tomb by the Guadalquivir, of which his
fellow-townsmen should probably say as they pointed it out to
strangers, 'Here sleeps the poet!' In his later days, oppressed
with drudgery and ill-health, as he looked towards the future he
bitterly saw himself forgotten, and oblivion settling down on all
his half-finished activities of heart and brain." (Mrs. Ward,
_ib_, p. 320.) It was in such a mood that he wrote this the most
painful of all his poems.]

LXVIII[1]

No se lo que he sonado
En la noche pasada;
Triste, muy triste debio ser el sueno,
Pues despierto la angustia me duraba.

Note, al incorporarme,
Humeda la almohada,
Y por primera vez senti, al notarlo,
De un amargo placer henchirse el alma.

Triste cosa es el sueno
Que llanto nos arranca;
Mas tengo en mi tristeza una alegria...
iSe que aun me quedan lagrimas!

[Footnote 1: Each stanza of this poem is composed of two
heptasyllabic verses followed (except in the case of the third
stanza which ends in a heptasyllabic verse) by two hendecasyllabic
verses. The even verses have the same assonance throughout. Notice
the _esdrujulo_ ending the poem.