Page 716 - of-human-bondage-

machines or engines of man’s invention, but by prayer and
fasting, by contrite sighs and by mortifications of the flesh.
It was a stronghold of God. Those gray houses were made
of no stone known to masons, there was something terrify-
ing in their aspect, and you did not know what men might
live in them. You might walk through the streets and be
unamazed to find them all deserted, and yet not empty; for
you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to every in-
ner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination
faltered like one who steps out of the light into darkness;
the soul walked naked to and fro, knowing the unknowable,
and conscious strangely of experience, intimate but inex-
pressible, of the absolute. And without surprise, in that blue
sky, real with a reality that not the eye but the soul confess-
es, with its rack of light clouds driven by strange breezes,
like the cries and the sighs of lost souls, you saw the Blessed
Virgin with a gown of red and a cloak of blue, surrounded
by winged angels. Philip felt that the inhabitants of that city
would have seen the apparition without astonishment, rev-
erent and thankful, and have gone their ways.
Athelny spoke of the mystical writers of Spain, of Teresa
de Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de Leon; in all of
them was that passion for the unseen which Philip felt in
the pictures of El Greco: they seemed to have the power to
touch the incorporeal and see the invisible. They were Span-
iards of their age, in whom were tremulous all the mighty
exploits of a great nation: their fancies were rich with the
glories of America and the green islands of the Caribbean
Sea; in their veins was the power that had come from age-

1