“Your previous volumes I have long possessed and highly prized; and I hope you mean to add more and more, so as to make the translation as nearly complete as a single life will permit.  It seems rather appalling to undertake the whole of so voluminous a writer.  Nevertheless, I hope you will do it.  Having proved that you can, perhaps you ought to do it.  This may be your appointed work.  It is a noble one.

“With much regard, I am, etc., “Henry W. Longfellow.

“Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Esq.”.

From the Same. 
Nahant, near Boston, August 10, 1857.

“My dear sir,

“Before leaving Cambridge to come down here to the sea-side, I had the pleasure of receiving your precious volume of ’Mysteries of Corpus Christi’; and should have thanked you sooner for your kindness in sending it to me, had I not been very busy at the time in getting out my last volume of Dante.

“I at once read your work, with eagerness and delight—­that peculiar and strange delight which Calderon gives his admirers, as peculiar and distinct as the flavour of an olive from that of all other fruits.

“You are doing this work admirably, and seem to gain new strength and sweetness as you go on.  It seems as if Calderon himself were behind you whispering and suggesting.  And what better work could you do in your bright hours or in your dark hours than just this, which seems to have been put providentially into your hands!

“The extracts from the ‘Sacred Parnassus’ in the Chronicle, which reached me yesterday, are also excellent.

“For this and all, many and many thanks.

“Yours faithfully,
“Henry W. Longfellow.

“Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Esq.”.

From George Ticknor, Esq., the Historian of Spanish Literature.  “Boston, 16th December, 1861.

“In this point of view, your volume seems to me little less than marvellous.  If I had not read it—­indeed, if I had not carefully gone through with the “Devocion de la Cruz”, I should not have believed it possible to do what you have done.  Titian, they say, and some others of the old masters, laid on colours for their groundwork wholly different from those they used afterwards, but which they counted upon to shine through, and contribute materially to the grand results they produced.  So in your translations, the Spanish seems to come through to the surface; the original air is always perceptible in your variations.  It is like a family likeness coming out in the next generation, yet with the freshness of originality.

“But the rhyme is as remarkable as the verse and the translation; not that you have made the asonante as perceptible to the English ear as it is to the Spanish; our cumbersome consonants make that impossible.  But the wonder is, that you have made it perceptible at all.  I think I perceive your asonantes much as I do those of August Schlegel or Gries, and more than I do those of Friederich Schlegel.  But he was the first who tried them, and, besides, I am not a German.  Would it not be amusing to have the experiment tried in French?”