If You Go There, You Will See The Same Scene Upon Which His
Basilisk Glance Reposed, - In A Changed World,
The .same unchanging
scene, - the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the
fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen
Sea, and in the centre of the perfect
picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold,
colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of
Northern gnomes. It is the palace of vanished royalty, the temple of a
religion which is dead. There are kings and priests still, and will be
for many coming years. But never again can a power exist which shall
rear to the glory of the sceptre and the cowl a monument like this. It
is a page of history deserving to be well pondered, for it never will be
repeated. The world which Philip ruled from the foot of the Guadarrama
has passed away. A new heaven and a new earth came in with the thunders
of 1776 and 1789. There will be no more Pyramids, no more Versailles, no
more Escoriais. The unpublished fiat has gone forth that man is worth
more than the glory of princes. The better religion of the future has
no need of these massive dungeon-temples of superstition and fear. Yet
there is a store of precious teachings in this mass of stone. It is one
of the results of that mysterious law to which the genius of history has
subjected the caprices of kings, to the end that we might not be left
without a witness of the past for our warning and example, - the law
which induces a judged and sentenced dynasty to build for posterity some
monument of its power, which hastens and commemorates its ruin. By
virtue of this law we read on the plains of Egypt the pride and the fall
of the Pharaohs. Before the fagade of Versailles we see at a glance the
grandeur of the Capetian kings and the necessity of the Revolution. And
the most vivid picture of that fierce and gloomy religion of the
sixteenth century, compounded of a base alloy of worship for an absolute
king and a vengeful God, is to be found in this colossal hermitage in
the flinty heart of the mountains of Castile.
A MIRACLE PLAY
In the windy month of March a sudden gloom falls upon Madrid, - the
reaction after the folie gaiete of the Carnival. The theatres are at
their gayest in February until Prince Carnival and his jolly train
assault the town, and convert the temples of the drama into ball-rooms.
They have not yet arrived at the wonderful expedition and despatch
observed in Paris, where a half hour is enough to convert the grand
opera into the masked ball. The invention of this process of flooring
the orchestra flush with the stage and making a vast dancing-hall out of
both is due to an ingenious courtier of the regency, bearing the great
name of De Bouillon, who got much credit and a pension by it.
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