We Did Not Know Them From The Christian Houses; But
There Are No Longer Any Mosques, While In Our Wanderings
We had the
pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in
the keeping of their sisterhoods
And brotherhoods, remain monuments of
the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to
secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution
and reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda
de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime
convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the
Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence
of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the
titular demigod. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a
moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of
an unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman Forum
used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but I
do not remember the trees - only those glorious columns climbing the
summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming the imperishable
memory of the republic that conquered and the empire that ruled the
world, and have never loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly
from the grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other
Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur which
no change short of some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the
earth.
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