The Puerta Del Sol - At This Season
Blazing With Relentless Light - Is Crowded With Patient Madrilenos In
Their Best Clothes, The Brown-Cheeked Maidens With Flowing Silks As In A
Ball-Room, And With No Protection Against The Ardent Sky But The
Fluttering Fan They Hold In Their Ungloved Hands.
As everything is
behind time in this easy-going land, there are two or three hours of
broiling gossip on the glowing pavement before the Sacred Presence is
announced by the ringing of silver bells.
As the superb structure of
filigree gold goes by, a movement of reverent worship vibrates through
the crowd. Forgetful of silks and broadcloth and gossip, they fall on
their knees in one party-colored mass, and, bowing their heads and
beating their breasts, they mutter their mechanical prayers. There are
thinking men who say these shows are necessary; that the Latin mind must
see with bodily eyes the thing it worships, or the worship will fade
away from its heart. If there were no cathedrals and masses, they say,
there would be no religion; if there were no king, there would be no
law. But we should not accept too hurriedly this ethnological theory of
necessity, which would reject all principles of progress and positive
good, and condemn half the human race to perpetual childhood. There was
a time when we Anglo-Saxons built cathedrals and worshipped the king.
Look at Salisbury and Lincoln and Ely; read the history of the growth of
parliaments. There is nothing more beautifully sensuous than the
religious spirit that presided over those master works of English
Gothic; there is nothing in life more abject than the relics of the
English love and fear of princes.
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