Albert Frederick Calvert

“ THE BRIDE OF ANDALUS An impression of colour, heat, and somnolence grows upon the stranger as he rambles through the bright alleys and sunlit plazas of Cordova. He may be neither painter, poet, nor antiquary; yet the opulence of vivid, almost garish tones, the romance that lingers about the Moorish courtyards and the perfumed gardens, and the surviving, pervasive suggestion of age, will stimulate his senses and imagination. For one who is capable of deeper and more subtle impressions, the old city will seem as a consummation of desire and a realisation of fanciful dreams. ”

“ No adventures more strange were encountered by any knight-errant. Not Amadis nor Esplandian, nor any of those whose fabled deeds had kindled his youthful imagination, displayed a loftier spirit of honour, or more worthily discharged his knightly devoir, than did Miguel de Cervantes when in duress in Algiers. A slave in the power of the bitter enemy of his creed and nation, cut off in the heyday of his fame from the path of ambition which fortune seemed to have opened to him; no lot could be more cruel than that which, in the fulness of his manhood and genius, fell to his share. ”

“ THE CITY OF THE MOOR Granada is the creation of the Moors. Its history is all of them—the record of their glory and their fall. The Pomegranate, as its conqueror styled it, ripened only in the warm sunshine of Islam, and withered with its decline. Under the Christian, it fell from the rank of a splendid capital to a poor provincial town. Now it subsists merely as a great monument to a vanished race and a dead civilisation. ”

“ For she was no inheritance from Celts or Romans, but was born in the Dark Ages, waxed prosperous within them, and declined with the Renaissance and the dawn of the modern era. There is nothing that is classical, little that is modern, about this old capital of Castile. All her memories are of Gothic, mediæval, romantic Spain. To her belong knights and barons, shield and helm and lance, tournaments and jousts, soaring Gothic spires, and the quiet of the cloister—all the pageant and panorama of mediævalism. ”

“ The Goth was the first real conqueror of Toledo; and the city, outwearing the scars of Rome, and throwing off the marks of the Moors, is, to-day, as insistently Gothic as Cordova and Seville are unmistakably Moorish.
One sees Toledo from the distance, from the bridges, and from the heart of the city, and recognises that it is as it has always been—that it will go down into the tomb of the centuries unchanged. It grew “out of the night of ages”—its rocky throne has defied the ravages of time and the transforming ingenuity of man. ”

“ This is why El Greco seems to chronicle for us our impressions of Toledo, and of Spain.
Surely no other painter has lived in a city in such strong agreement with his spirit. Think of the place—wind-swept, heat-dried, extraordinarily austere, yet flushed with colour, ochre-red shading to unusual greens; heaped upon its rocky throne above the yellow flowing Tagus, its rugged silhouette straight cut against a sky hard and clear as enamel; and, beyond, the sierra like a great brown sea in which it all stands as an island starting from the waves. ”

“ The genius of the sovereign stamps a character upon his time. The nobles of Granada, emulating the graceful taste of their monarch, filled the city with magnificent palaces, the halls of which were adorned with mosaics, the ceilings wrought in fretwork, and delicately gilded and painted, or inlaid with precious woods; they had lofty towers of wood or stone, carved and ornamented, and covered with plates of metal that glittered in the sun. ”

“ Poetry, as a national characteristic, is an accident of climate. Here is Barcelona, the Manchester of Spain, a hive of manufacturing industry, rejoicing in one of the most lovely sites in Europe, possessed of a climate equal to that of Naples, and with its beauty untarnished by the hand of time, or the artificer. Such an atmosphere, such skies, such stars make a people poets against their wills. ”

“ VALENCIA & MURCIA THE OLD KINGDOM OF VALENCIA Shut in between the barren range of the Sierra Molina on the north, and the arid plains of Murcia to the south, the ancient Kingdom of Valencia is one of the regions of Spain least visited by the tourist. And yet, a flowering and fruitful Eden, it lies beneath a burning sun, its waters trained in obedience to the hand of man. It puts forth a vegetation of tropical luxuriance. ”