Quando La Reina Del Cielo
Puso Los Pies En El Suelo,
En Esta Piedra Los Puso,
Or as my English will have it:
When the Queen of Heaven put
Upon the earth her foot,
She put it on this stone
and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger
through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years
of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.
We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by and going away
enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries;
and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur and
beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate
desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously
or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one
vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical
event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a
mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso
through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water.
Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied
the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave
reality to the affair in every part.
I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most
lovably beautiful temple.
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