I recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your
benevolent compassion. You will find in his pages the humours of
starving workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an
exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of
attention. And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no
visionary. He is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a grasp on
real human affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with
bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds
to prayer in the holy places of the earth.
But I like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like! His quiet days
require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to
take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven--or is it
nine?--crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a
wretchedly straitened space. A most unconventional thing is his notion
of quietness. One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the
author of _Quiet Days in Spain_ all days may seem quiet, because, a
courageous convert, he is now at peace with himself.
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