Statues And Pillars Are Alike Antique, And Give You A
Moment Of The Eternal City The More Intense Because The Promenade Is Of
An Unkempt And Broken Surface, Like The Cow-Field Which The Roman Forum
Used To Be.
Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but I
do not remember the trees - only
Those glorious columns climbing the
summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming the imperishable
memory of the republic that conquered and the empire that ruled the
world, and have never loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly
from the grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other
Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur which
no change short of some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the
earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all their works, into the
local and provisional; Rome remains for all time imperial and universal.
To descend from this high-horsed reflection, as I must, I have to record
that there did not seem to be so many small boys in Seville as in the
Castillian capitals we had visited; in the very home of the bull-feast
we did not see one mimic _corrida_ given by the _torreros_ of the
future. Not even in the suburb of Triana, where the small boys again
consolingly superabounded, was the great national game played among the
wheels and hoofs of the dusty streets to which we crossed the
Guadalquivir that afternoon. To be sure, we were so taken with other
things that a boyish bull-feast might have rioted unnoticed under our
horses' very feet, especially on the long bridge which gives you the far
upward and downward stretch of the river, so simple and quiet and empty
above, so busy and noisy and thronged with shipping below. I suppose
there are lovelier rivers than that - we ourselves are known to brag of
our Pharpar and Abana - but I cannot think of anything more nobly
beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed, where she
has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman and Gothic and Arab
and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the time at least, only
from the scarlet hulls of the tramp steamers lying in long succession
beside the shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to
welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of
Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers;
and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching
or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had
some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from
the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish
dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens of the Moorish
palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they were long ago obliterated
behind it; and though it was so recent, no doubt it would have had its
pathos if I could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem
power in Spain.
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