These fragile nuns were to travel through the cold night—and a raw November gale was blowing over the uplands of Castile—to take a steamer at Bordeaux, for they were pioneers, on their way to found a house in a distant part of South America, where education was backward. Three weeks of winter sea, then some tropical days on horseback, before they reached their desolate new home! Truly the heroic spirit of St. Teresa is alive to-day, and fair sisters of the seraphim still walk among us.
EVENING IN AVILA
Around about the town stand eighty gray stone towers,
That make a fitter crown, a hardier show than flowers
For what is high and brave—the tawny Castile plain—
So patient and so grave, incarnate soul of Spain.
You have made sweet the ways of penury and care
With dawn and sunset praise and white still hours of prayer,
Old town of mystic saint! Secure you ask: Does peace,
Or restless seeking plaint come with your wealth's increase?
An answering sound of bells across the upland goes,
To each field-toiler tells a message of repose,
And mounting to the sky's slow-darkening, tranquil dome
The heart-calm echoes rise of peasants lingering home.
MADRID AND THE ESCORIAL
"They who wrought wonders by the Nile of old,
Bequeathing their immortal part to us,
Cast their own spirit first into the mould,
And were themselves the rock they fashioned thus."
GEORGE SANTAYANA.
THESE two spots, products of men of small idea and nature, are happily so close together that they can fall under the same abuse. Coming from the north, to stop at the Escorial either from Avila with its grand walls of the eighty towers, or from the crag-set castle of Segovia, is such an abrupt transition from heroic times to the doctrinaire centuries that followed them that it is but too easy to be unfair to Philip II's huge pile. A better way is to go out to it from Madrid; then, somewhat accustomed to cold commonplace, the Escorial gives less of a jar.
We descended to it from Segovia. Knowing Herrera's lifeless architecture—"a syllogism in stone" it has wittily been called—on that side I did not expect much, but accounts of the setting of the Escorial, of its grand solitary position in the mountains, made me hope for some kind of effect. People see things in such different ways. I could discover no grandeur whatever in the position of the rectangular ashy-colored building. The lower slopes of the Guadarramas rise behind it, but at a little distance, and the town comes between it and the sierras. It was not solitary, it was not imposing. At close range, after we had walked up the leafy avenue from the station, even the appearance of unity was lost, and it seemed nothing but a big block of good town houses like many that fill the square between four city streets. Window after window, alike inadequately small and unadorned; just like any monotonous line of town houses. We stood aghast at the pretentious, ineffectual mass which they call the eighth wonder of Spain. For us to-day there is little wonder in spending fifty millions in one lifetime to put up myriads of doors, stair-cases, and courtyards, to use two thousand pounds of iron to make the door-keys; we are accustomed to the feat. The pity is that every tourist in Spain comes here, and one in a thousand goes to Poblet or León, those other pantheons that are proper burial places for sturdy old kings. I am not sure that the Hapsburgs in Spain merit anything worthier than an Escorial.