"Este monasterio è églesia mandaron hacer los muy esclarecidos Principes è señores D. Hernando è Doña Isabel, Rey y Reina de Castilla, de Leon, de Aragon, de Sicilia, los cuales señores por bienaventurado matrimonio y untaron los dichos Reinos, seyendo el dicho rey y señor natural de los reinos de Aragon y Sicilia, y seyendo la dicha señora Reina y señora natural de los Reinos de Castilla y Leon; el cual fundaron à gloria de nuestro señor Dios, y de la bienaventurado Madre suya Nuestra señora la Virgin Maria, y por especial devocion que le ovieron." The few pictures are quite worthless, but pictures are not needed in such a wealth of stone-work. What are needed to make San Juan de los Reyes less crude in its frank over-decoration are, shadow, the dim luminosity of stained glass, the softened glow of bejewelled light, the tender mystery and charm of pillared aisle, the grace of length to give majesty to solidity. It totally lacks the essential quality of reverence, that elusive and unanalysable suggestion of the beyond, the supreme, the intangible, of that inexplicable aspiration that ever stirs the soul of primitive and civilised man, and has taught him to seek its expression in the building of church and temple; in the white splendour of the Parthenon, the very soul of Greek genius in stone, in the grey dimness of Gothic cathedral, in which Christian fervour finds almost an immaterial beauty of definition, the quality of lofty distinction which belongs to the highest poetry and eloquence. Here you are not assailed by a sense of the melancholy loveliness of death, as when you stand beside some canopied tomb of greatness in the softened gloom of an old cathedral. There is none of the lingering charm of legend and peopled shade, none of the obscurity of deep recess, the chill shiver of vaulted solitude, the vibrant ache of other days, that serene and bewitching [Illustration: CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES] misery we feel whenever we travel backward by the road of strange and wonderful experience that has moulded and developed humanity. For San Juan de los Reyes reveals to us nothing of that past whose enigma forever tortures the curious mind, nothing but the admirable skill of some unknown sculptors, provokes neither musing nor aspiration, nor instils the poisonous enchantment of artistic sadness.