From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared
more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows?
It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet
shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast
church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left
it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow,
winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One
of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great
thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its
court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of
yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure
sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself,
as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had
here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through
French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to
the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and
near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left it
hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the
crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade
cool in our faces.
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