To-day as one wanders through this vast and silent edifice of the Escoriál it can well seem as if that sanctuary of death, buried beneath the church, is the dead heart, connected by the arteries of its nearly one hundred miles of corridors with the huge organs and spreading limbs of a prodigious leviathan. One has left behind the exhilaration of the air of the Sierras the glorious spaciousness of the outside prospect, and as the artificial vastness closes in about one, the spirit becomes numbed and chill. It is a stupendous Golgotha, a colossal Place of Skulls. Yet we shall be lacking in imagination if we cannot realise that the dead heart once beat and that the ponderous body once enshrined a soul. It may have been a mad soul; certainly it was a proud one, of high exaltation, white to its core with the flame of an intense ideal. None the less was it something of a craven soul, evading the problems of this life, and fearing the life to come; closing its eyes to the light and wrapping itself in the darkness of superstition. It is the soul of one man that was thus enshrined; but in many respects it is revealed as the soul of the Spanish people. Seen at noonday in summer, the Escoriál stands, shadowless in the sunshine, at the foot of the bare Sierra, looking out over a vista of barren stubble, parched grass and dried up water-courses; an undulating sweep of pallid buff, interrupted sparsely by grey olive bushes; pitilessly inhospitable. But, in the slanting light of the afternoon, the Sierras near and far lose the bleakness of their pinkish buff beneath transparent tones of mauve and lavender, while the harsh nudity of the endless vega becomes clothed in tender veils of variously modulated greys. Even the inexorableness of the granite pile is assuaged, as the shadows creep about its base, the contours and surfaces of its facades melt into iridescent hues and the dome and towers rise up to meet the cooling sky with something of aerial suggestion. Slowly, as the light wanes the Escoriál and its vast setting become to the imagination spiritualised; but the spirit that hovers over them and enters into yours is, if I mistake not, for all its beauty impregnated with sadness, which, as the darkness blots out distance and buries the monastery beneath the gloom of the Sierras, dies into a sense of awe.