The soft, sonorous syllables of Guadalquivir (from the Arabic Wad-el-Kebir, or The Great River) would picture to the imaginative eye a river far more poetic than the sluggish stream that loiters across the wide plain and fruitful valley until it pierces the amber girdle of crenelated walls and embattled towers which enclose the treasures of Seville. On its broad bosom have swept the barks and galleys of Phœnicia and Greece, of Roman, Goth, and Moor. On its shores Columbus lowered the sails of his caravel and presented Spain with a new world on Palm Sunday, 1493; Pizarro and Cortez here first embarked their greedy and daring adventurers; hither Pizarro returned with hoards of gold and silver treasures from Mexico and Peru, for the Council of the Indies restricted all the trade of the colonies to the port of Seville. The valley through which the river descends is sheltered from the cold tablelands lying northward by the Sierra Moreña chain. Gray olive trees, waving pastures, and fields of grain cover its slopes. A soft, tempered wind whispers through the grassy meadows of La Tierra de Maria Santissima, and the atmosphere is so dry and clear that far away against the horizon objects stand out in clear silhouette. So vivid are the colors that the smoky olive groves, the orange and lemon-colored walls, the fir trees, the chalky white of the stucco, the fleshy, prickly leaves of the cacti, and the tall standards of the aloes seem photographed on the brain. In a fair and fruitful land lies the city, and her spires pierce a smokeless, unspotted sky. In the heart of the city, set down in the very centre of her life of song and laughter and childish simplicity, surrounded by crooked streets and great airy courts, in the widest sunlit square, lies her Cathedral. The first impression made by a building is generally not only the most distinct but the truest. That produced by Seville's Cathedral is its immensity of scale. Toledo la rica, Salamanca la fuerta, Leon la bella, Oviedo la sacra, Sevilla la grande, runs the Spanish saying. The size is overpowering. Each of the four side aisles is nearly as broad and high as the nave of Westminster Abbey, while the arcades of Seville's nave have twice the span. To the impressionable sensitiveness of Théophile Gautier it was like a mountain scooped out, a valley turned topsy-turvy. Notre Dame de Paris might walk erect under the frightful height of the middle nave; pillars as large as towers appear so slender that you catch your breath as you look up at the far-away, vaulted roof they support.