The place is probably dense with history and suffocating with
association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my
own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a
summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but
otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph
itself without blurring any earlier record. This, perhaps, is why I love
so much to dwell there on that never-ending afternoon of late October.
It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was
enriching it beyond the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails
in the Spanish landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look
out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty. Of
course, we tried to master the facts of the Generalife's past, but we
really did not care for them and scarcely believed that Charles V. had
doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who had it from Ferdinand of
Aragon, and so withheld it from his heirs for four generations until
they could ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they
withdrew and became the patrician family now its proprietors.
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