I Do Not Think That A Company Of Hidalgos In Complete Medieval Armor Could Have Moved Me More Strongly Than That First Sight Of These Wine-Skins, Distended With Wine, Which We Had Caught In Approaching The House Of Miranda.

We had to stop in the narrow street, and let them pass piled high on a vintner's wagon, and looking like a load of pork:

They are trimmed and left to keep the shape of the living pig, which they emulate at its bulkiest, less the head and feet, and seem to roll in fatness. It was joy to realize what they were, to feel how Spanish, how literary, how picturesque, how romantic. There they were such as the wine-skins are that hang from the trees of pleasant groves in many a merry tale, and invite all swains and shepherds and wandering cavaliers to tap their bulk and drain its rich plethora. There they were such as Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw them malignant giants and fell enchanters, and slashed them with his sword till he had spilled the room half full of their blood. For me this first sight of them was magic. It brought back my boyhood as nothing else had yet, and I never afterward saw them without a return to those days of my delight in all Spanish things.

Literature and its associations, no matter from how lowly suggestion, must always be first for me, and I still thought of those wine-skins in yielding to the claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence when now for the second time we came to it.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 49 of 376
Words from 13143 to 13418 of 103320