e sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant
changing forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes a
hot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire the
various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for the
beckoning flames of hell.

The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out of
another age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to a
Catalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. We
sat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails of
the homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behind
us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut at
one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and
peppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore,
hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it was
marriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls and
the love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of a
family, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain on
which lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in that
proud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement,
"By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall":

Canta esposa, fila i canta
que el pati em faras suau
Quan l'esposa canta i fila
el casal s'adorm en pau.

It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer
and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon
countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new
cohesions were in the making.

"I want my liberty," he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty of
thought and action." He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "But
I want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine."

Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us in
soft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown face
flushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Greco
madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin.
Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the
sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were
sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting
beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a
sailless sea. And for a moment I under