Castilian Days eBook

But though enriched by all these legacies of an immemorial past, there seems no hope, no future for Segovia.  It is as dead as the cities of the Plain.  Its spindles have rusted into silence.  Its gay company is gone.  Its streets are too large for the population, and yet they swarm with beggars.  I had often heard it compared in outline to a ship,—­the sunrise astern and the prow pointing westward,—­and as we drove away that day and I looked back to the receding town, it seemed to me like a grand hulk of some richly laden galleon, aground on the rock that holds it, alone, abandoned to its fate among the barren billows of the tumbling ridges, its crew tired out with struggling and apathetic in despair, mocked by the finest air and the clearest sunshine that ever shone, and gazing always forward to the new world and the new times hidden in the rosy sunset, which they shall never see.

THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS

Emilio Castelar said to me one day, “Toledo is the most remarkable city in Spain.  You will find there three strata of glories,—­Gothic, Arab, and Castilian,—­and an upper crust of beggars and silence.”

I went there in the pleasantest time of the year, the first days of June.  The early harvest was in progress, and the sunny road ran through golden fields which were enlivened by the reapers gathering in their grain with shining sickles.  The borders of the Tagus were so cool and fresh that it was hard to believe one was in the arid land of Castile.  From Madrid to Aranjuez you meet the usual landscapes of dun hillocks and pale-blue vegetation, such as are only seen in nature in Central Spain, and only seen in art on the matchless canvas of Velazquez.  But from the time you cross the tawny flood of the Tagus just north of Aranjuez, the valley is gladdened by its waters all the way to the Primate City.

I am glad I am not writing a guide-book, and do not feel any responsibility resting upon me of advising the gentle reader to stop at Aranjuez or to go by on the other side.  There is a most amiable and praiseworthy class of travellers who feel a certain moral necessity impelling them to visit every royal abode within their reach.  They always see precisely the same things,—­some thousand of gilt chairs, some faded tapestry and marvellous satin upholstery, a room in porcelain, and a room in imitation of some other room somewhere else, and a picture or two by that worthy and tedious young man, Raphael Mengs.  I knew I would see all these things at Aranjuez, and so contented myself with admiring its pretty site, its stone-cornered brick facade, its high-shouldered French roof, and its general air of the Place Royale, from the outside.  The gardens are very pleasant, and lonely enough for the most philosophic stroller.  A clever Spanish writer says of them, “They are sombre as the thoughts of Philip II., mysterious and gallant as the pleasures of Philip IV.”