gaiety, which
comes upon one oddly in the gloomy town. Here the decoration, the gilded
virgins, the elaborate carving, do not oppress as elsewhere; the effect
is too debonair and too refreshing. It is one colour more, one more
distinction, in the complexity of the religious sentiment.

* * *

But if what I have said of Granada seems cold, it is because I did not
easily catch the spirit of the place. For when you merely observe and
admire some view, and if industrious make a note of your impression, and
then go home to luncheon, you are but a vulgar tripper, scum of the
earth, deserving the ridicule with which the natives treat you. The
romantic spirit is your only justification; when by the comeliness of
your life or the beauty of your emotion you have attained that, (Shelley
when he visited Paestum had it, but Theophile Gautier, flaunting his red
waistcoat _tras los montes_, was perhaps no better than a Cook's
tourist,) then you are no longer unworthy of the loveliness which it is
your privilege to see. When the old red brick and the green trees say to
you hidden things, and the _vega_ and the mountains are stretched before
you with a new significance, when at last the white houses with their
brown tiles, and the labouring donkey, and the peasant at his plough,
appeal to you so as to make, as it were, an exquisite pattern on your
soul, then you may begin to find excuses for yourself. But you may see
places long and often before they are thus magically revealed to you,
and for myself I caught the real emotion of Granada but once, when from
the Generalife I looked over the valley, the Generalife in which are
mingled perhaps more admirably than anywhere else in Andalusia all the
charm of Arabic architecture, of running water, and of cypress trees, of
purple flags and dark red roses. It is a spot, indeed, fit for the
plaintive creatures of poets to sing their loves, for Paolo and
Francesca, for Juliet and Romeo; and I am glad that there I enjoyed such
an exquisite moment.

XXXIII

[Sidenote: The Alhambra]

From the church of _San Nicolas_, on the other side of the valley, the
Alhambra, like all Moorish buildings externally very plain, with its red
walls and low, tiled roofs, looks like some old charter-house. Encircled
by the fresh green of the spring-time, it lies along the summit of the
hill with an infinite, most simple grace, dun and brown and deep red;
and from the sultry wall on which I sat the elm-tre