_Don Quixote_ is written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid, still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’ _La Celestina_ promised a century before. The tempo is slow. More correctly, the organic movement of the prose is slow; and the facet movements are swift and nervous. The Cervantine prose is a portrait of the soul of Spain whose cadences of desire and will resolve into an immobile whole. The accentual music of this prose had already become the innate quality of Castilian. Cervantes heightened his inheritance. The natural genius of the language was already, in the mystics and novelists before him, one that made for a muscular, slow yet sharply surfaced prose. In _Don Quixote_, the music has as its base an almost cosmic beat, within which as in a firmament, the swifter, brighter, more fleeting qualities stand forth. Cervantes makes good use of the agglutinated verb and pronoun, of the syncopations within the general prose rhythm. Above all, he makes use of the loamy expressions of the people, transfiguring them, however, into a tonal design not remotely naturalistic and more akin to the prose of the religious writers than of the pícaro novelists who also helped themselves to the vernacular of the soil. In the great novel of Rojas there is a like marriage of pungent and ironical stuffs in an exalted orchestration. The difference is one of quality and quantity. Cervantes’ instruments are more varied; his themes and the materials that build them are more numerous, even if no one is richer than the central form of _La Celestina_. Indeed, the earlier work is the intenser; its colors are more hot. There is in Cervantes a strain of the north which the Jew Rojas lacked; and which made his æsthetic action longer and slower. The art of the Semite is more lyrical, less architectonic. _La Celestina_ is a bomb-like organ; a piston-strong machine driving hard and singly. It is the tale, moreover, of a city where life is vertical and packed. Its form is true to its theme. But _Don Quixote_ is the story of a journey--of three journeys rather--over the plains and mountains of La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia. Its basal movement is panoramic, horizontal. Its loftier dimensions are attained by the associative power of its hero who, riding the roads of Spain, touches incessantly the spiritual realms of a people, of an age, of a soul. The formal values of _La Celestina_ are more manifest. Very consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakes _immediately_ of the whole. This is not the case in _Don Quixote_. The materials of the book--persons of the road, interpolated stories, situations--stand end to end, flat for the most part and quite episodic. The knight enters them organically. He transfigures them as a new element in a chemical solution. He enacts a continuous catalysis upon the parts of Spain which he encounters. The result of this is two-fold.