d going away
enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries;
and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur
and beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate
desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously
or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one
vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical
event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance
a mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso
through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water.
Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied
the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave
reality to the affair in every part.

I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most
lovably beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we
could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and
catch here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in architecture or
sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and silver and precious
marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns and sunsets which used to
lend themselves so much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do
now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared
more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows?
It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet
shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast
church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left
it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow,
winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One
of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great
thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its
court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of
yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure
sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself,
as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had
here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through
French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to
the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and
near