The Youth, who daily farther from the east
      Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
      And by the vision splendid
      Is on his way attended;
    At length the Man perceives it die away,
    And fade into the light of common day.

In Luis de Leon, as in Wordsworth, art is raised to a hieratic dignity:  both have a splendid simplicity, a most lofty expression of sublime meditation—­qualities rare everywhere in every age, and rarest of all in the flamboyant, if gloomy, Spain of the sixteenth century.

Luis de Leon has his weak points.  He does not attain to the angelic melody of St. John of the Cross.  He is apt to be indifferent to sheer beauty of form; though he often reaches it, this success seems with him to be a happy accident.  Lucidity is not his main object; though he uses simple terms, his immense range of knowledge tempts him at whiles to indulge in allusions which it might tax all the ingenuity of commentators to explain.  Commentators of Luis de Leon have a sufficiently heavy task before them in reconstructing the text of his poems—­the heavier because the originals no longer exist.  Sr. de Onis has given us some idea of the problems to be solved.[275] Whatever flaws are revealed in Luis de Leon’s manner, he is nearly always vital, nearly always has something elevating, illuminating and beautiful to say.  As a human being, too, he is not above criticism.  There is an unpleasant savour in the story that he asked Antonio Perez to let him have the Chrysostom manuscript which he proposed to translate in Paris, the profits to be divided.  We need not believe this perhaps calumnious little tale.  Antonio Perez is open to suspicion of being an assassin and a traitor; he may also have been untruthful.  Luis de Leon is not a candidate for canonization.  He was no icicle of perfection.  He was something vastly more interesting than a chill intellectual:  a man ardent, austere, conscious of resplendent intellectual faculties, perhaps a little arrogant when off his guard, incautious but wary, individualistic but self-sacrificing, emotional, sensitive, reticent:  a mass of conflicting qualities blended, unified and held in subjection by sheer strength of will, fortified by a professional discipline, deliberately embraced and rigorously followed.  Add to this that he had in a supreme degree the creative impulse, an irrepressible instinct for self-expression.  It is not strange that the self-expression of a personality so fine, so complex, so rich, so rare, should produce the series of compositions which entitle Luis de Leon to rank among the very greatest of Spanish poets, and beside the most glorious figures in the history of any literature.  He stands a little apart from the rest of Spanish poets in a splendid solitude which befits him; he must perforce be solitary, dwelling as he most often does at altitudes inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

Those solemn heights but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams: 
Alone the sun arises, and alone

                    Spring the great streams.