One Should Live Near
Them, And Visit Them Daily, If One Would Feel Their Beauty In Its
Recondite Details; To
Have come three thousand miles for three minutes
of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's
Being, and I will
not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is
that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the fagade
of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian
captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in
their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most
sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of
warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for
being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the
church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that
reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man's inhumanity to man!
How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had eaten
through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were very, very
decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on battle-fields.
Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would
not have any one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings
used to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but
which the common American must now see by going outside the church.
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