Though one brief spring restores to earth the flowers
Swept from her lap by autumn's stormy hours,
Back to man's breast a lifetime will not win
The heart's ease lost through one frail moment's sin.
Chapter I
White as a nest of gulls, in the cleft of a rock on the wild sea-shore, gleams Cadiz from the concavity of her walls. So audaciously is she seated in the very midst of the billows that the land reaches out an arm to retain her. This slender arm of stone and sand, wearing La Cortadura, a fortress constructed during the glorious war of independence, as a bracelet, separates the violent waves of the ocean from the tranquil waters of the harbor, and conducts to the city of San Fernando, which, situated in the curve of the bay, opens its dock-yards of La Carraca as hospitals to the vessels that return home, maltreated and bruised, from their perilous expeditions.
Poor wanderers, to whom the tempests are ever repeating what the blasts of the world unceasingly say to mortals, "On, on!" When they reach their country, they lay hold of her with their anchors, as children clasp the necks of their mothers with their little hands.
Beyond the city of San Fernando, the beautiful and worthy neighbor of Cadiz, with its splendid Calle Larga, and its houses solid and shining as if built of massive silver, and beyond the bridge Zuazo, so ancient that its construction is attributed to the Phoenicians, the road divides into two branches the one on the left continuing to follow the curve of the bay, and that on the right taking the direction of Chiclana. It enters this pleasant town through a grove of white poplars, which, settled like hoary patriarchs in the midst of green fields, seem by their whisperings to be encouraging the weaker plants to strengthen themselves and stand like them against the heavy south-west winds. The town is large, and divided into two parts by the river Liro.
From two neighboring heights it was overlooked in former times by a Moorish tower on the one, and a Christian chapel on the other; symbols of its past and present. Within a few years the tower has disappeared and the chapel has become a ruin.
There was a temple and an altar, where
The lonely heart might weep and lay its care:
I wept. Once more I passed that way,
And it was fallen to decay:
Whereat I wept again!
The chapel was under the invocation of St. Anna. It was round and encircled by a colonnade, which commanded the view, in all directions, of a magnificent landscape.
At the foot of the isolated and abandoned tower lay a cemetery. Mouldering humanity creeping sympathetically into the shadow of the decaying ruin. This tower—this seal of stone upon the archives of the place; this inheritance of generations, which the district had guarded like the remains of a dead chief, embalmed by the aroma of the flowers of the field; this austere ruin, which had no longer any relations except with the departed, who were turning to skeletons at its feet; with the birds of night which hid themselves in its obscure recesses from the noise and light of day, and with the winds that came to moan sadly through its branches—this inoffensive tower could not escape modern vandalism.