GUSTAVO ADOLFO

BECQUER (1836-187o)  , Spanish poet and romance-writer, was born at Seville on the 17th of February 1836 . Left an orphan at an early age, he was educated by his godmother, refused to adopt any profession, and drifted to Madrid, where he obtained a small post in the civil service . He was dismissed for carelessness, became an incorrigible Bohemian, and earned a precarious living by translating foreign novels; he died in great poverty at Madrid on the 22nd of December 187o . His works were published posthumously in 1873 . In such prose tales as El Rayo de Luna and La Mujer de piedra, Becquer is manifestly influenced by Hoffmann, and as a poet he has analogies with Heine . He dwells in a fairyland of his own, crooning a weird elfin music which has no parallel in Spanish; his work is unfinished and unequal, but it is singularly free from the rhetoric characteristic of his native Andalusia, and its lyrical ardour is of a beautiful sweetness and sincerity .