A Corridor In The Escorial.

A Court In The Escorial.

There is, however, one minute part of this building which looks habitable; for within the handle of the gridiron are a few apartments, made cheerful after Philip II's time, so that people could occasionally sleep here without danger of insanity. Yet this cheerfulness is only superficial. Behind the tapestries is the same cold granite, and just below these rooms is the Pantheon, the burial-place of Spanish kings. Into that crypt the light of day never penetrates; but, by the glimmer of lamplight, we could see that the walls surrounding the gilded coffins of the Spanish sovereigns were lined with porphyry, jasper, and agate. But oh! what words can picture its unearthly chill? Compared with that, the temperature of the corridors seemed tropical. While standing there with uncovered heads, it seemed to me that the skeleton of Death was using my spine for a flute, running his icy fingers up and down the vertebrae, and touching me here and there with clammy hands. Our teeth chattered like the instruments in a telegraph office, and I asked no questions for fear of biting my tongue off. We were glad enough when the door of the Pantheon closed behind us, and we had left the gorgeous hall of Death in its mantle of everlasting darkness, and felt no more its piercing, glacial breath. It is, no doubt, a splendid sepulchre; but oh, rather than all that icy grandeur, give me a grave, however humble, beneath the open sky, where the air is perfumed by the breath of flowers and is musical with the song of birds!

Philip II's Chairs.

The most interesting part of the Escorial is the portion which constituted the residence of Philip II. Particularly impressive was the bare, comfortless room where he died in agony, after he had been carried once more through these tomb-like halls, that he might bid farewell to the work of his life. On one side is the little window to which, on the morning of September 13, 1598, he dragged his emaciated form that he might fix his closing eyes upon the altar where mass was being said in the adjoining chapel. Here, grasping the same crucifix that Charles V had held in his last moments, this cruel and misguided bigot breathed his last, and, after forty years of tyranny and persecution, bequeathed to Spain a decay which has never since been checked.

In this room we saw the wooden chair on which he sat and boasted that from this wild mountain solitude he ruled two worlds. Beside it is the bench on which he placed his gouty limb, and on its leathern cover we discerned the imprint of that heel which during two-score years rested so heavily on half the world. After innumerable burnings and beheadings, Philip could boast here that not a heretic lived within his kingdom; but for the same reason that another tyrant was able to say to his confessor, who urged him on his death-bed to forgive his enemies: "Father, I have no enemies: I have killed them all."

The portrait of Philip II painted by Titian hangs in the Escorial. It is indeed the face of a man who is said to have laughed outright but once in his life, and that was when he heard of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. His cold, gray eyes have a hideous glitter of cruelty in them, and seem to possess no more warmth than the granite of the Escorial. At the same time, the picture is so lifelike that the grave seems to have given up its dead, and I felt, in looking at it, that I had at last come face to face with the pallid phantom which had apparently been following us everywhere with the stealthy footfall of a ghost. In imagination one can see him seated among the dreary boulders of the hillside, watching with eager eyes the progress of this edifice, as bar after bar was added to the granite gridiron. One recollects, too, the remarkable scene when a messenger brought him the tidings of the destruction of the Spanish Armada, that fleet of invasion on which he had expended a hundred million ducats, and eighteen years of his life. The iron countenance of Philip remained unmoved, and looking up from his writing he answered merely:

"I thank God for having given me the means to bear this loss without embarrassment, and power to fit out another fleet of equal size. A stream can afford to waste some water when its source is not dried up."