Legends & Romances of Spain. Lewis Spence

Legends & Romances of Spain - Lewis Spence


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and can only be liberated by the spell of study. This book contains merely the poor shadows and reflected wonders of screened and hidden marvels.

      L. S.

      Edinburgh

       June 1920

       Table of Contents

       Page

       The Cid bids farewell to his Wife Frontispiece

       A Glimpse of Old Spain 16

       A “Trovador” of Old Spain 50

       The Cid in Battle 64

       Elisena and Perion behold one another 96

       The Firm Island 112

       The Proud Circumstance of Chivalry 132

       Palmerin encounters Fairies at the Edge of the Wood 172

       Partenopex in Melior’s Chamber 190

       Don Roderic is tempted by a Semblance of Cava 210

       Count Alarcos meets his Wife and Children at the Gate of the Castle 218

       Aben Habuz and the Captive Princess 272

       The Three Princesses watch the Approach of the White-sailed Galley 286

       Don Alfonso summons his Sages 308

       Torralva and the Spirits 338

       Don Quixote’s Love-madness 360

       Table of Contents

      Romance, Romance, the songs of France,

      The gestes of fair Britaine,

      The legends of the sword and lance

      That grew in Alemaine,

      Pale at thy rich inheritance,

      Thou splendour of old Spain!

      Anon.

      If, spent with journeying, a stranger should seat himself in some garden in old Granada, and from beneath a tenting of citron and mulberry leaves open his ears to the melody of the waters of the City of Pomegranates and his spirit to the sorcery of its atmosphere, he will gladly believe that in the days when its colours were less mellow and its delicious air perhaps less reposeful the harps of its poets were the looms upon which the webs of romance were woven. Almost instinctively he will form the impression that the Spaniard, having regained this paradise after centuries of exile, and stirred by the enchanted echoes of Moorish music which still lingered there, was roused into passionate song in praise of those heroes of his race who had warred so ceaselessly and sacrificed so much to redeem it. But if he should climb the Sierra del Sol and pass through the enchanted chambers of the Alhambra as a child passes through the courts of dream, he will say in his heart that the men who builded these rooms from the rainbow and painted these walls from the palette of the sunset raised also the invisible but not less gorgeous palace of Spanish Romance.

      Or if one, walking in the carven shadows of Cordova, think on the mosque Maqsura, whose doors of Andalusian brass opened to generations of poets and astrologers, or on the palace of Azzahra, built of rose and sea-coloured marbles rifled from the Byzantine churches of Ifrikia, will he not believe that in this city of shattered splendours and irretrievable spells the passion-flower of Romance burst forth full-blown?

      But we cannot trace the first notes of the forgotten musics nor piece together the mosaic of broken harmonies in the warm and sounding cities of the Saracens, neither in “that mine of silk and silver,” old Granada, nor among the marble memories of Cordova, whose market-place overflowed with the painted parchments of Moorish song and science. We must turn our backs on the scarlet southern land and ascend to the bare heights of Castile and Asturias, where Christian Spain, prisoned for half a thousand years upon a harsh and arid plateau, and wrought to a high passion of sacrifice and patriotism, burst into a glory of martial song, the echoes of which resound among its mountains like ghostly clarions on a field of old encounter.

       Table of Contents

      The homeland of Spanish tradition was indeed a fitting nursery for the race which for centuries contested every acre of the Peninsula with an enemy greatly more advanced in the art of warfare, if inferior in resolution and the spirit of unity. Among the flinty wastes of the north of Spain, which are now regarded as rich in mineral resources, are situated at intervals luxuriant and fertile valleys sunk deep between the knees of volcanic ridges, the lower slopes of which are covered with thick forests of oak, chestnut, and pine. These depressions, sheltered from the sword-like winds which sweep down from the Pyrenees, reproduce in a measure the pleasant conditions of the southern land. Although their distance one from another tended to isolation, it was in these valleys that Christian Spain received the respite which enabled her to collect her strength and school her spirit for the great struggle against the Saracen.

       Table of Contents


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