Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the
place with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, and we had
constant reason to be glad of our guide as we met or passed them in the
measureless courts and endless corridors.
At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the
gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one
shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the
circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the
advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have
passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than
that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace,
where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly,
as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining
with gold and polished marble.
It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to
eternal death, its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the
dark piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the
edifice. But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest
achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too wholly,
upon this gloomy ideal.
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