All the shops were shut, and the whole town presented an appearance of mourning. The townspeople walked two and two in perfect silence from the station outside the town to the entrance of the church, drawing up before the steps of the university, where a local orator gave a short address, upon the close of which a student recited one of Rosalia’s poems to the listening multitude. Then the students showered a rain of laurel wreaths upon the coffin, while the musicians played Shadello’s “Pieta Signor,” and tears flowed on every side. As the procession arrived at the church of Santo Domingo, an unusual spectacle presented itself. The students of the university awaited with lighted torches the arrival of the bier, and carried it into the church upon their own shoulders. “I never saw anything more touching,” writes Failde, “than the sight of so many young faces streaming with tears, and I do not know whether those tears flowed more for their poetess or for their country.” “Lugar mais hermoso No mundo n’ hachara Qu’ aquel de Galicia Galicia encantada.” It has been said that only those regions which have a peculiar and individual vitality can produce a literature of their own. The very fact that Galicia possessed--in the early Middle Ages--both prose and poetry composed and written in her particular dialect is a sign in itself that she was once full of life and energy. As we have seen in a previous chapter, the language of Galicia has justly been called the mother of Portuguese. “Great is the excellence of the Gallegan tongue,” wrote the Marquis of Figueroa,[202] “not only because it adapts itself so easily to poetic expression, but also on account of its great and noble past.” Galicia is rich in legends, which, to the ignorant peasants, are gospel truths; she is rich in historic ruins; in every town the escutcheons on her houses tell of noble families that flourished in her midst. Once one of the most important and influential parts of the kingdom, she gave her language to the court, and it was through Galicia that the poetry of Provence passed into Castille and Portugal.[203] But after the fifteenth century, when her autonomy had been taken from her, and when she had sunk to the level of an abandoned and almost forgotten province, there was no vitality left in her, and the stream of her literature was dried. Her political decadence had brought with it literary decay. Her best families left her to settle in Madrid and the rising towns of Spain, and the interests of the province paled before those of the capital and the Court. Even her poets abandoned the language of Galicia in favour of that of Castille.[204]