hangings of rich brocades, rent into
minute shreds, were scattered far and wide over the surrounding chase.
Eighty years later, the repose of the emperor was once more broken by
his great-grandson, Philip IV. For thirty-three years that prince was
engaged in building the celebrated Pantheon, begun by his father, Philip
III. On the sixteenth of March, 1654, the dust of the Austrian kings of
Spain and of their consorts who had continued the line, was translated
from the plain vault of Philip II. to this splendid sepulchral chamber,
which gleamed, in the light of a thousand tapers, with its marble and
jasper and gold, like a creation of oriental romance. Each coffin was
borne by three nobles and three Jeromite friars; the procession being
headed by that of Charles V., carried by Don Luis de Haro, the Duke of
Abrantes, and the Marquess of Aytona. As the remains were to be
deposited in a marble sarcophagus, it became necessary to remove the
previous coverings, which enabled Philip IV. to come face to face with
his great ancestor. The body of the emperor was found to be quite
entire. After looking at it for some minutes in silence, the king turned
to Haro, and said, "Honored body, Don Luis." "Very honored," replied the
minister; words, brief indeed, but very pregnant; for the prior of the
Escorial has left it recorded "that they condensed all that a Christian
ought to feel on so solemn an occasion."

Charles did not leave the world without some of those portents in which
the men of that age loved to trace the influence of a remarkable death
upon the operations of nature. A comet appeared over the monastery at
the beginning of his last illness, and was seen no more after the night
on which he died. In the spring of 1558, a lily in his garden, beneath
his windows, bore two buds, of which one flowered and withered in due
course, but the other remained a bud through the summer and autumn, to
the great astonishment of the gardener and the friars. But on the night
of the twenty-first of September it burst into full bloom, an emblem of
the whiteness of the parting spirit, and of the sure and certain hope of
its reception into bliss. It was reverently gathered, and fastened upon
the black veil which covered the sacramental shrine in the church. In
the week following the grand obsequies, a pied bird, large as a vulture,
but of a kind unknown at Yuste, perched at night on the roof of the
church, exactly over the imperial grave, and dist