Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling--
Bottom he ne'er can touch--whose grief eternal
He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?
Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled
--A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel--
While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast?

The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level
throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still
remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained
lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample beauty
and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old Testament
style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a group with
_Paradise Lost_ and _The Excursion_, but in a tone halfway between the
two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and substantial poet
that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency towards
grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted previous similar
efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to the
interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an artist: the absolute
surrender to one dominant thought and a certain deficiency of form
bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose sequence of
meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images or
advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His human body:
Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated
in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the
splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour
of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are
interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse
becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on