On the sides of the cathedral are many chapels, each with its altar, its pictures, its relics, and its history. By one of them, once a Moorish sanctuary paved with silver, is a rude painting of a crucifixion, and an inscription in Spanish which tells us that that—
“While the Mahometans celebrated their orgies in this temple, a Christian captive uttered the name of Christ, whom he held in his heart, and he engraved this image with his nails on the hard stone of this pillar, for which his death has purchased this aureole.”
On the stone column is etched a crucifixion which tradition says the prisoner scratched in with his finger nails. The stone is very hard, and the story harder.
Come again and again, and this strange pile, with its thousand columns and its thousand years of history, grows on you with every visit. We come from a land where all is fresh and new, and these old temples fill us with awe. But if we are impressed with a ruin as in Rome, where Paganism built its temples to become the sites of Christian churches, which themselves have been buried and again dug up to be the wonder of the present age, how much more impressive is a building still fresh and unbroken by the march of centuries, where the pomp and ceremony of a religion, corrupt indeed, yet recognizing God the Father as the only true God, are perpetuated year after year till their number becomes a thousand years.
CHAPTER IX.
SEVILLE, ITS CATHEDRAL AND BULL-FIGHTS.
NOT until reaching Seville does one feel what a luxury it is to live,—just to breathe,—to inhale the delicious air and rejoice in being. Other climates had been cold, or damp, or chilly; some hot, debilitating; but this was just right, and when a man comes to the place where the weather just suits him, it is time to sit down and enjoy it. It was a privilege to be any thing that could breathe in this delightful clime. It is the latter part of February. If one of my lungs was out of order, or both of them, I would stay here till they were well, or until the weather became too hot for comfort, and that will be but a few weeks hence.
The city is clean, well-built, and in the evening the inhabitants throng some of the streets so as to make it difficult to walk. The courts around which the houses are built are beautifully adorned with flowers and shrubs, and trees; in warmer weather awnings are spread over them, and here the family enjoy themselves with the piano and guitar, the song and the dance. Here, too, the table is spread, and all Seville, it is said, takes tea out of doors.
“LA GERALDA,” SEVILLE.
It was a dreadful day for Seville, and indeed for Spain, when the Moors were driven out of the country; they had conquered it, and ruled eight hundred years. Four hundred thousand Moors, Jews and Arabs, left this city of Seville in a few days after it was surrendered to St. Ferdinand. Wealth, learning, taste, art, and the charm of Eastern life went out with them, and Spain has been lower in the scale of morals and manners ever since. This is no compliment to Mahometanism. To compare the present condition of Spain with any thing that has gone before it, and say that the former days were better than these, is saying very little for the better times. In this old city of Seville we found the Alcazar or palace, being the first specimen of Moorish magnificence we had seen. It consists of a group of palaces, on the banks of the Guadalquiver, and exhibits the same style of architecture and mural decorations that are so much admired and celebrated in the Alhambra. Indeed, the pavements and columns and arches and apartments have been preserved or restored with so much greater care than the Alhambra itself, that the latter appears to be a feeble example of Moorish taste and skill, compared with these glorious rooms in Seville. Fancy must people these chambers with men and women, of flesh and blood; clothe them in Oriental and gorgeous raiment, surround them with every luxury that gold and labor and power can give; hang these passages with curtains whose richness has not been excelled by any thing that modern art has produced. When the sleepy janitor opens the outer gate and leads you through these deserted and empty halls, in which your footfalls make the only sound, into apartments that for centuries have been silent as the grave, yet on every hand is beauty of coloring and carving and curiously wrought adorning that you must pause to admire; even in the midst of admiration one cannot but mourn that the barbaric splendor of Moorish glory has departed, and the degenerate race of effete Spanish civilization has taken its place. A thousand wives of a proud Moor once made these walls jocund with their mirth, and the adjoining gardens and the beautiful Guadalquiver were gay with their revels and song, and the moral tone of the palace was as high, and the happiness of the people just as great as when a dissolute queen and a profligate court, and an ignorant, depraved, and impoverished people, constituted the government and inhabitants of a nominally Christian kingdom.