The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 16, February, 1859

The harmless Ghost, that walks with helm unbarred
And beckoning hand;

And, beautiful as dreams of maidenhood,
That doubt defy,
Young Hamlet, with his forehead grief-subdued,
And visioning eye.

O fair dead world, that from thy grave awak'st
A little while,
And in our heart strange revolution mak'st
With thy brief smile!

O beauties vanished, fair lips magical,
Heroic braves!
O mighty hearts, that held the world in thrall!
Come from your graves!

The Poet sees you through a mist of tears,—
Such depths divide
Him, with the love and passion of his years,
From you, inside!

The Poet's heart attends your buskined feet,
Your lofty strains,
Till earth's rude touch dissolves that madness sweet,
And life remains:

Life that is something while the senses heed
The spirit's call,
Life that is nothing when our grosser need
Engulfs it all.

And thou, young hero of this mimic scene,
In whose high breast
A genius greater than thy life hath been
Strangely comprest!

Wear'st thou those glories draped about thy soul
Thou dost present?
And art thou by their feeling and control
Thus eloquent?

'Tis with no feigned power thou bind'st our sense,
No shallow art;
Sure, lavish Nature gave thee heritance
Of Hamlet's heart!

Thou dost control our fancies with a might
So wild, so fond,
We quarrel, passed thy circle of delight,
With things beyond;

Returning to the pillows rough with care,
And vulgar food,
Sad from the breath of that diviner air,
That loftier mood.

And there we leave thee, in thy misty tent
Watching alone;
While foes about thee gather imminent,
To us scarce known.

Oh, when the lights are quenched, the music hushed,
The plaudits still,
Heaven keep the fountain, whence the fair stream gushed,
From choking ill!

Let Shakspeare's soul, that wins the world from wrong,
For thee avail,
And not one holy maxim of his song
Before thee fail!

So, get thee to thy couch as unreproved
As heroes blest;
And all good angels, trusted in and loved,
Attend thy rest!

EL LLANERO

De todos los Generales cual es el mejor?
Es mi General José con su Guardia de Honor!

I. THE HATO

It is only within a century that the world has become habituated to behold the birth of nations, and already the spectacle has grown too common to attract more than transitory notice. In the sluggish days that preceded the revolutionary efforts of our fathers, a nationality was fixed, seemingly immutable, the growth of scarcely numbered ages, the daughter of immemorial Time. A people then could place its hand upon its title-deeds, and, looking back through half a score of centuries, trace its gradual development from nothingness to power. To-day, on the contrary,—to use a somewhat daring metaphor,—nations have become autochthonous; they have repudiated the feeble processes of conception and tutelage; they spring, armed and full-grown, from the forehead of their progenitors, or rise, in sudden ripeness, from the soil.

Thousands must now be living, the citizens of prosperous states, who can recall the days when they had entered upon manhood and yet the name itself of their nation had no existence. How many, indeed, are still among us, to whom nations owe the impetus that gave them birth! Prominent, at least, among those who can lay claim to such distinction, there still stands one whose career it were well, perhaps, to study. We will endeavor to profit by a glance at it.

With this intent let us transport ourselves in imagination to the Llanos or Plains of Venezuela. It is a region similar in some respects, widely dissimilar in others, to the more celebrated Pampas of the regions to the south. The wonderful plain, covering more than two hundred thousand square miles, and forming the basin of the gigantic Orinoco, is a study in itself. The stranger who descends upon the vast savanna from the mountains that line and defend the coast is impressed with the momentary belief, when his eye for the first time sweeps over the level immensity, that he is again approaching the sea. From the hilly country through which he has toiled, he beholds at his feet a limitless and dusky plain, smooth as an ocean in repose, but undulating, like it, in gigantic sweeps and curves. The Llanos that he sees spread out before him thus are one huge and exuberant pasture. Like the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, they are the support of myriads of roaming cattle; but, unlike them, they are intersected by numerous rivers, and suffer rather from excess than from lack of moisture. The Orinoco sweeps, in turbid magnificence, from west to east, traversing their entire breadth; and its countless tributaries seam in every direction the immense plain thus divided, and frequently by their unmanageable floods turn it for thousands of miles into a lake.

The dwellers in this region have a character no less distinctive than that of the Plains themselves. At long intervals, sometimes scores of miles apart, their habitations are established; but their home is the saddle. Innumerable herds of cattle and of horses turn to account the pasturage of the rich savanna; and the true Llanero exists only as guardian or proprietor of these savage hosts. He is as much at home in this trackless expanse of rank vegetation as the mariner navigating a familiar sea. There are no roads in the Llanos; but he can gallop unerringly to any given point, be it hundreds of miles away. There are no boundaries to the huge estates; but he knows when the cattle he is set to protect are grazing upon their own territory or upon that of a neighbor. He leads a life in which the extremes of solitariness and of activity are combined. Separated from his nearest neighbor by a journey of half a day, visited only rarely at his hato or farm-house by some casual traveller, or by the itinerant Galician peddler, whom he contemptuously denominates the merca-chifles, the silent horseman lives wrapt up in ignorance of all but the care of the roving beasts that are intrusted to his vigilance.

Let us glance somewhat more nearly at the Llanero in his home. If we are able to obtain an elevated view of the savanna,—let us say, in the Llanos which constitute the Province of Barinas, and through which the Apure rolls its rapid current to swell the volume of the Orinoco,—we shall observe, at distant intervals upon the plain, irregular groups of palm-trees surmounting the wavy level of the grass. These isolated clumps or groves, called matas in the provincial idiom, form the landmarks of the Venezuelan Plains; and in the neighborhood of each we shall find the hato or dwelling of a Llanero. The building, we shall find in every case, is a roughly-constructed hut, consisting of a floor raised a couple of feet above the spongy soil, and covered with a steep roof of palm-branches, with perhaps a thatch composed of the leaves of the same invaluable tree. A rough partition of mud-plastered twigs divides the Llanero's dwelling into unequal apartments; the lesser being reserved for the use of the females of the household, while the larger, furnished with half-a-dozen hides, the skin of a jaguar, and a couple of benches or stools ingeniously manufactured from bamboo, is the general reception-room, sleeping-apartment, and workshop for the hatero, when the floods are out, or when he takes a fancy at other times to shelter his head beneath a roof. A few rods from the dwelling is the corral or cattle-pen, a large oval inclosure, into which, at irregular intervals, he drives his herds for purposes of branding or enumeration; and near the corral two or three impatient horses, shackled with a thong confining the forelegs, are grazing.

The cattle-farms or hatos of the Plains are owned, for the most part, by the Creole residents of the cities which dot their outskirts, but are inhabited only by the semibarbarous hateros, who attend to the few requirements of the stock, and slaughter the annual supply. The hatero, although a descendant, and proud that he is so, of the Spanish settlers, has much intermixture of Indian and negro blood in his veins. Few of the Llaneros, indeed, could show a pedigree in which the Castilian blood was not sorely attenuated and diluted with that of half-a-dozen Indian or negro progenitors. He is born on the Llanos, as were his ancestors for many generations; and he has no conception of a land in which cattle-plains are unknown, and where the carcass of an animal is of more value than the hide. His ideas are restricted to his occupation, and his religious notions limited to the traditional instruction handed down from the days when his forefathers lived amid civilized men, or to the casual teaching of some fervent missionary, who devotes himself to the spiritual welfare of these lonely dwellers on the Plains. Eight or ten persons at the utmost form a hato, and suffice for all the requirements of thousands of cattle. The women are as much accustomed to solitude as the men, and spend their time in domestic occupations, or in cultivating the little patch of ground upon which their supply of maize and cassava is grown. The occasion of their marriage is perhaps the only one of their visit to a town,—perhaps their only opportunity of seeing a printed book. Men and women alike are a simple, healthy, ignorant race, borrowing manners, dress, and dialect rather from the Indian than from the Spanish stock.

Such as he is, nevertheless, and for the purposes which his existence subserves, the true Llanero is indeed well placed in his peculiar region. A man of middle stature, usually of broad and powerful build, short-necked, with square head and narrow forehead, and with eyes that would be black, if it were not for the fire that flickers in them with a carbuncle-like intensity. From the hips upward the Llanero is straight and well-proportioned; but his constant equitation curves and bandies his legs in a manner plainly visible whenever he attempts to walk. His distinctive costume consists of the calzones, or cotton breeches, reaching a little below the knee, a tunic or smock-frock of the same material, confined about his waist with a thong of leather, into which he thrusts his formidable machete or cutlass, and the inevitable poncho, that many-colored blanket which the entire Spanish-American race has adopted at the hands of the vanquished Indians, and which he uses as cloak, as pillow, as bed, and sometimes as saddle. Boots he has none, nor shoes; but perhaps he may fasten strips of raw hide to his feet by way of sandals,—and a piece of raw hide covers, in all probability, his head. He cares little for ornament, since there are so few about him to admire display; and all his pride is concentrated in the steed that bears him, the lasso that he can throw with such unerring aim, and the heavy lance that he uses in driving his ferocious cattle, or as a death-dealing weapon when he is called upon to take part in some partisan warfare.

Upon his hato, perhaps, there are between one and two hundred thousand head of cattle and horses, guarded here and there by isolated posts of a nature similar to his own. The animals, savage from their birth, roam the plain in droves of many hundreds, each herd commanded by two or three bulls or stallions, whose authority is no less despotic than that of the colonel of a Russian regiment. They sweep from feeding-ground to feeding-ground, galloping eight or ten abreast, headed by scouts, and suffering no human being or strange animal to cross their path. As the dusky squadron hurries, like an incarnate whirlwind, from one point to another, every one prudently withdraws from their irresistible advance; and instances have occurred in which large bodies of troops, marching across the Plains, have been scattered and routed by an accidental charge of some such wild-eyed regiment. At certain intervals, la hierra, the branding, takes place; when drove after drove are dexterously compelled within the walls of the corral, and there marked with the initials or cipher of the proprietor. This is the great festival of the hatero, and he invites to it all his neighbors for scores of leagues around. The bellowing cattle, the plunging steeds, the excitement of lassoing some bull more refractory than usual, the hissing of the iron as it sears the brand-mark deep into the animal's hide, all these are elements of exquisite enjoyment to the unsophisticated Rarey of the Plains. His great delight, on such occasions, is to display his skill in lassoing an untamed colt, or in performing the feat called to colear a bull. He selects from the suspicious herd some fine young three-year old, grazing somewhat apart from the main body, and creeps silently towards it. Suddenly the lasso flies in snaky coils over the head of the beast, and is drawn with strangulating tightness about its neck. At the first plunge, a brother hatero lassoes the animal's hind legs, and it is permitted to rear and kick as frantically as it can, until it drops to the ground exhausted and strangled. The Llanero immediately approaches the prostrate colt, and deliberately beats its head with a heavy bludgeon until it becomes quite senseless. He then places his saddle upon its back, adjusts a murderous bit in its clammy mouth, and seats himself firmly in the saddle at the moment when the animal recovers strength enough to rise. The fearful plunges, the wild bounds, the vicious attempts at biting, which ensue, are all in vain; in a couple of days he subsides into a mere high-spirited trotter, whom one can ride with ease after once effecting a mount.