Castilian Days eBook

A luxury of grief, in those who can afford it, consists in shutting up the house where a death has taken place and never suffering it to be opened again.  I once saw a beautiful house and wide garden thus abandoned in one of the most fashionable streets of Madrid.  I inquired about it, and found it was formerly the residence of the Duke of------.  His wife had died there many years before, and since that day not a door nor a window had been opened.  The garden gates were red and rough with rust.  Grass grew tall and rank in the gravelled walks.  A thick lush undergrowth had overrun the flower-beds and the lawns.  The blinds were rotting over the darkened windows.  Luxuriant vines clambered over all the mossy doors.  The stucco was peeling from the walls in unwholesome blotches.  Wild birds sang all day in the safe solitude.  There was something impressive in this spot of mould and silence, lying there so green and implacable in the very heart of a great and noisy city.  The duke lived in Paris, leading the rattling life of a man of the world.  He never would sell or let that Madrid house.  Perhaps in his heart also, that battered thoroughfare worn by the pattering boots of Ma-bine and the Bois, and the Quartier Breda, there was a green spot sacred to memory and silence, where no footfall should ever light, where no living voice should ever be heard, shut out from the world and its cares and its pleasures, where through the gloom of dead days he could catch a glimpse of a white hand, a flash of a dark eye, the rustle of a trailing robe, and feel sweeping over him the old magic of love’s young dream, softening his fancy to tender regret and his eyes to a happy mist—­

  “Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
  Before the useful trouble of the rain.”

INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE

Intelligent Spaniards with whom I have conversed on political matters have often exclaimed, “Ah, you Americans are happy! you have no traditions.”  The phrase was at first a puzzling one.  We Americans are apt to think we have traditions,—­a rather clearly marked line of precedents.  And it is hard to see how a people should be happier without them.  It is not anywhere considered a misfortune to have had a grandfather, I believe, and some very good folks take an innocent pride in that very natural fact.  It was not easy to conceive why the possession of a glorious history of many centuries should be regarded as a drawback.  But a closer observation of Spanish life and thought reveals the curious and hurtful effect of tradition upon every phase of existence.