It is a shut place that commands by its shutness the open place about it. A castle is builded of the stone of its world: it rises from the stone of its world: it _is_ the stone of its world. A castle is austere toward the world which it defends. It is invariable, forbidding: its strength is that of a perpetual shutting-out of all which lies outside it. Sun beats on the castle wall: inside it is dark. Moon melts on its bastion and bathes its county blue: it is harsh and rigid. Water and wind make song of the green hills: the castle is silent. It is lord of its county because it is apart from it. A castle is hot in a cold land: a castle is cold in a hot land: a castle is high in a low land: a castle is full in a land of dearth: a castle is dry in a land of verdure. Within the castle walls, anarchy may flame: the walls are law enough. The walls are spirit and sanctity enough, so that within life may be mad and fleshly. A castle draws on the affluence of its world to save its world: it lifts itself into a desert peak, that the low lands may flourish: and then it sucks the land. Castile becomes a castle. The chaos of running passion and idea hardens: Christian Spain, weary at last of ages of dissension, steals the discarded fervor of the Moor: becomes one passion, permanent and crystal, to withstand all others. Upon the crest of Spain forms this stony essence of her will. The actual struggle dies: the Moslem world droops away toward Africa. But the spirit of the struggle becomes rock. A castle to defend the soul of Spain; and Spain’s soul at last a castle. The walls raised to minister to an open land grow higher, grow ever more remote from the reason of their being. Become at last a reason unto themselves. See the castle now, stirred from its mooring in a fertile world! The fertile world itself must turn into a castle! This will of service destroys the served. This vision is so intense that it is blind. The castle is become an unleashed monster, mobile as the Arab or the Cid. It lives--to be a castle. And it devours the spirits and fields of men which raised it up in order to protect them. The castle, become Spain, moves through Europe: moves across the sea. Its shut erectness is the measure of good. Its sunless cells are the measure of light. Its turrets are the church. Its trampling march over the pliant earth is music. Its dream is to make a castle of the House of God. _b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_ The Province of Valladolid in Old Castile is fertile. The plain has the aspect of a verdant sea swept by long tides, the hills. In Spring the fields of wheat and barley unfurl their delicate green illimitably to horizons where white clouds stand like enchanted caravels. In the soft grass and the turf, velvety with rains, the flowers sparkle like myriad splinters of sky. And on this vastness, under a solid Dome, towns stand as sudden islands.