not, however, correspond to any continuity in treatment or in outer subject, though the recurrence of the word sendero, path, does convey the idea of self-development along the road of experience which is the real inner subject of all. The first volume, La Paz del Sendero, appeared in 1903, ushered in by no less a preface-writer than Ruben Dario. Despite its display of almost peasant-like simplicity, this work betrays the intellectual reader of home and foreign poetry. Thus, the opening poem, that which gives its title to the book, is an admirable adaptation to modern uses of the mediaeval stanza known in Spanish literature as cuaderna via. We note here a merely formal reminiscence of Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, in more ways than one, as we shall have to observe anon, a literary ancestor of Ayala. Together with the revival of this national vein, Ayala's early poems show a strong subservience to the poetical manner of Francis Jammes. This is clear in Ayala's attitude towards old houses, animals, and nature, and it goes as far as close imitation in the following passage :

Aqui en mi casa de campo, tengo una vieja butaca

de gutapercha ; y es tan

humilde la pobre anciana que cuando algun visitante

viene a verme, no repara

en ella, y me dice :—Siempre tan solo, senor Ayala.

No se aburre sin salir ?

Y yo pienso cuando marcha

que las gentes son muy frivolas,

Quand un visiteur me dit en entrant :

— Comment allez-vous, Monsieur Jammes ?

This close imitation of Francis Jammes suggests more than one feature of Ayala's poetry. Quaintness and tenderness are two well-known characteristics of the Asturian nature. They are conspicuous in Francis

Jammes's work and easily explain why it should have had in France at the time a succiu de nouveautê. Led away by this instinctive sympathy between his own nature and that which in the French poet was at most a manner of the mind, Ayala does not seem to have been able to avoid in some of the poems of this first book the pitfall towards which Francis Jammes himself had strayed—a certain affectation which is the weak point of a poetry otherwise not devoid of a peculiar charm. But, though as an imitator of Jammes Ayala naturally proved inferior to his model, the youthful Asturian poet already revealed in some compositions of this his early work an earnestness which was to prove his salvation—an earnestness in which it was possible to detect two wholly different moods : one dominated by a philosophical, almost religious preoccupation with the idea of destiny : the other, marked by an asthetic instinct towards truth and restrained expression. Hence, despite a certain awkwardness which is not without an attractiveness of its own, a work full of beauty in which the typical qualities of Ayala's style can already be detected : his rich vocabulary, his sense of the value and the music of words, his

1 Here in my country house I have an old arm-chair, and so old and so humble, the poor old friend, that when visitors come to see me they do not notice her, and say : ' Always alone, Senor Ayala! Don't you get bored at home ? ' And when they go, I muse how frivolous people are, how conceited and how vain, for they will not even look at my valetudinary friend.

Il y a une armoire a peine luisante Qui a entendu les voix de mes grand'tantes,

Qui a entendu la voix de mon grand-pore,

Qui a entendu la voix de mon pere. A ces souvenirs l'armoire est fidele, On a tort de croire qu'elle ne sait

que se taire,

Car je cause avec elle.

Il est venu chez moi bien des hommes et des femmes

Qui n'ont pas era a ces petites ames.

Et je souris que l'on me pense seul vivant

muy soberbias y muy vanas

porque no miran siquiera
a esta valetudinaria.1