No Literary Art Has Ever Reported A Sense Of Picture Or
Architecture Or Sculpture To Me:
The despised postal card is better for
that; and probably throughout these "trivial fond records" I shall be
found shirking as much as I may the details of such sights, seen or
unseen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing regret for the
impossibility of remembering them.
I must leave for some visit of the
reader's own the large and little facts of the many chapels in the
cathedral at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of
the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation, which
I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of those
picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging
to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into
the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because
I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the
cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a
moment in glad relief.
VII
One house in some forgotten square commemorates the state in which the
Castilian nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then
Valladolid, contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the
northern uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage
through the open portal into its leafy _patio_ shivering in the cold,
and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which
would be the only heat in our hotel.
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