It Is Of Death, Not Life, That The Escorial Preaches, And It Was To
Eternal Death, Its Pride And Gloom, And Not Life Everlasting, That The
Dark Piety Of Philip Voluntarily, Or Involuntarily, Consecrated The
Edifice.
But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest
achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too wholly,
upon this gloomy ideal.
The Escorial has been many times described; I
myself forbear with difficulty the attempt to describe it, and I satisfy
my longing to set it visibly before the reader by letting an earlier
visitor of my name describe it for me. I think he does it larger justice
than modern observers, because he escapes the cumulative obligation
which time has laid upon them to find the subjective rather than the
objective fulfilment of its founder's intention in it. At any rate, in
March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission
the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles
Stutart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the Spanish
king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his most delightful
"familiar letters" concerning the Escorial to a friend in London.
"I was yesterday at the Escorial to see the monastery of St. Lawrence,
the eighth wonder of the world; and truly considering the site of the
place, the state of the thing, the symmetry of the structure, with
diverse other rareties, it may be called so; for what I have seen in
Italy and other places are but baubles to it.
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