[1] Abandoning his first intention of entering the Jesuit order, he studied medicine at Madrid, found an opening in politics as a supporter of the Moderate party, and, after occupying several subordinate posts, became governor of Castellón de la Plana, of Alicante and of Valencia.

[2] His first appearance as a poet dated from 1840, when the Madrid Lyceum of Art and Literature published his Ternezas y flores, a collection of idyllic verses, remarkable for their technical excellence.

His Ayes del Alma (1842) and his Fábulas morales y politicas (1842) sustained his reputation, but showed no perceptible increase of power or skill.

These studies are chiefly valuable as embodying fragments of self-revelation, and as having led to the composition of those doloras, humoradas and pequenos poemas, which the poet's admirers consider as a new poetic species.

One critic has described it as a didactic, symbolic stanza which combines the lightness and grace of the epigram, the melancholy of the endecha, the concise narrative of the ballad, and the philosophic intention of the apologue.