Now That I Am This Good Distance Away, And Cannot Bring Myself To Book
By A Second Experience, I Feel It Safe To Say That I Had A Feeling Of
St. Peter's-Like Immensity In The Church Of The Escorial, With More Than
St. Peter's-Like Bareness.
The gray colorlessness of the architecture
somberly prevails in memory over the frescoes of the painters invited to
relieve
It in the roof and the _retablo,_ and thought turns from the
red-and-yellow jasper of altar and pulpit, and the bronze-gilt effigies
of kneeling kings and queens to that niche near the oratory where the
little terrible man who imagined and realized it all used to steal in
from his palace, and worship next the small chamber where at last he
died. It is said he also read despatches and state papers in this nook,
but doubtless only in the intervals of devotion.
Every one to his taste, even in matters of religion; Philip reared a
temple to the life beyond this, and as if with the splendor of the
mausoleum which it enshrines he hoped to overcome the victorious grave;
the Caliph who built the mighty mosque at Cordova, which outlasts every
other glory of his capital, dedicated it to the joy of this life as
against the gloom of whose who would have put it under the feet of
death. "Let us build," he said to his people, "the Kaaba of the West
upon the site of a Christian temple, which we will destroy, so that we
may set forth how the Cross shall fall and become abased before the True
Prophet.
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