The Hospital Is The Monument Of His Devotion To Good
Works, And Is Full Of Every Manner Of Religious Curio.
I cannot remember
to have seen so many relics under one roof, bones of both holy men and
women,
With idols of the heathen brought from Portuguese possessions in
the East which are now faded from the map, as well as the body of St.
John of God shrined in silver in the midst of all.
I do not know why I should have brought away from these two places a
peacefulness of mind such as seldom follows a visit to show-places, but
the fact is so; perhaps it was because we drove to and from them, and
were not so tired as footworn sight-seers are, or so rebellious. One who
had seen not only the body of St. John of God, but his cane with a
whistle in it to warn the charitable of his coming and attune their
minds to alms-giving, and the straw basket in which he collected food
for the poor, now preserved under an embroidered satin covering, and an
autograph letter of his framed in glass and silver, might even have been
refreshed by his experience. At any rate, we were so far from tired that
after luncheon we walked to the Garden of the Generalife, and then
walked all over it. The afternoon was of the very mood for such a visit,
and we passed it there in these walks and bowers, and the black cypress
aisles, and the trees and vines yellowing to the fall of their leaves.
The melancholy laugh of water chasing down the steep channels and
gurgling through the stone rails of stairways was everywhere, and its
dim smile gleamed from pools and tanks. In the court where it stretched
in a long basin an English girl was painting and another girl was
sewing, to whom I now tardily offer my thanks for adding to the charm of
the place. Not many other people were there to dispute our afternoon's
ownership. I count a peasant family, the women in black shawls and the
men wearing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than as strangers;
and I am often there still with no sense of molestation. Even the reader
who does not conceive of a garden being less flowers and shrubs than
fountains and pavilions and porches and borders of box and walls of
clipped evergreens, will scarcely follow me to the Generalife or outstay
me there.
The place is probably dense with history and suffocating with
association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my
own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a
summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but
otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph
itself without blurring any earlier record. This, perhaps, is why I love
so much to dwell there on that never-ending afternoon of late October.
It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was
enriching it beyond the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails
in the Spanish landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look
out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty.
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