The Outlook Was Over Vast
Plowed Lands Red As Virginia Or New Jersey Fields, Stretching And
Billowing Away From The Yellow Tagus In The Foreground To The
Mountain-Walled Horizon, With Far Stretches Of Forest In The Middle
Distance.
What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or
embrowning foliage in the city gardens the
Prospect included, one should
have the brush rather than the pen to suggest; or else one should have
an inexhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in
it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city
of Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange.
Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me think of Genoa; and
if the reader's knowledge does not enable him, to realize it from this
association, he had better lose no time in going to Genoa.
I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day's
demand upon the city's wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly
have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole
life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the fullness of that
beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add tragedy, add unendurable
orthodoxy, add the pathos of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather
give a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to go back and
give another day to it and come every year and give a day. This very
moment, instead of writing of it in a high New York flat and looking out
on a prospect incomparably sky-scrapered, I would rather be in that
glass-roofed _patio_ of our histrionic hotel, engaging the services of
one of the most admirable guides who ever fell to the lot of mortal
Americans, while much advised by our skull-capped landlord to shun the
cicerone of another hotel as "an Italian man," with little or no
English.
As soon as we appeared outside the beggars of Toledo swarmed upon us;
but I hope it was not from them I formed the notion that the beauty of
the place was architectural and not personal, though these poor things
were as deplorably plain as they were obviously miserable. The
inhabitants who did not ask alms were of course in the majority, but
neither were these impressive in looks or bearing. Rather, I should say,
their average was small and dark, and in color of eyes and hair as well
as skin they suggested the African race that held Toledo for four
centuries. Neither here nor anywhere else in Spain are there any traces
of the Jews who helped bring the Arabs in; once for all, that people
have been banished so perfectly that they do not show their noses
anywhere. Possibly they exist, but they do not exist openly, any more
than the descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their Moslem
rites.
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