He Took Us, Naturally, To Several Churches, Old And New, With
Their Gothic And Rococo Interiors, Which I Still Find Glooming And
Glinting Among My Evermore Thickening Impressions Of Like Things.
We got
from them the sense of that architectural and sculptural richness which
the interior of no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give; but
what their historical associations were I will not offer to say.
The
associations of San Sebastian with the past are in all things vague, at
least for me. She was indeed taken from the French by the English under
Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier
farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it seems
to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the
partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since
as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink
the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they
need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps
no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the
Basques have been where they are immeasurably beyond the memories of
other men; what the scope of their own memories is one could perhaps
confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in
the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the
Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules;
the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then
Christianized the province.
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