Their faces are
turned on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.
I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya had also painted:
the face of Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had
been one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village.
That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the village,
with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its long lamp-lit
winter nights when I was trying to find my way through Moratin's history
of the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, so that
fragments of the fact still hang about me. I wish now I could find the
way back through it, or even to it, but between me and it there are so
many forgotten passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only
remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone through it, and
emerging from time to time into the light that glimmered before me. I
cannot at all remember whether it was before or after exploring this
history that I ventured upon the trackless waste of a volume of the
dramatists themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and
came down to those of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and Lope
de Vega were writing the plays.
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