It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears
with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete
it. To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of royal
palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the people whose
pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have this palace
completed as the architect imagined it.
We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind
minstrels who began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see
us they could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in
conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled
court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of
the Moors.
The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much
of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is
not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the
environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which
cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the
Alcazar at Seville.
Pages:
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383