The buildings of the university are the least of it. In the Library you may find manuscripts by Alfonso the Wise, glosses by thirteenth century Jews, Arabic illuminations of Gazali. You may sit in the same chill lecture halls where once great masters taught humanities and where but yesterday Miguel de Unamuno “explained” Greek after the universal measure. But Salamanca is an ancient seer whose word has gone forth to the world, while the body shriveled and the blood grew bleak. More of the university is the tropical gold work of the Dominican altars; is the stupendous grace of the two Cathedrals; is the immense glower of the Jesuit on the hill. More, the sedulous symmetry of the Plaza within the coil of gutters. More, the glow of the yellow mellow stone within the desert fastness of Castile. _c._ _The Water Bridge_ The æsthetic sense of Spain is social, instinctive, unconscious. Her master works of art rise like isolate acts from the trammels of her life. Her cities are among them: and none more perfect than the ancient towns bristling upon rocks within the Castilian desert. Choose your day well for visiting these communal works of Spain. Salamanca needs sun: its warm gold stones speak graciously within an azure sky. The Escorial is best in rain: its chill stones shrink from the blue-gold of the Spanish day, but under the drift of breaking clouds it glows like fossil fire. Segovia sings most clearly in a wind. Great clouds like armies plunge from the Sierras and invest the Castle. The sun makes sudden sallies on the Cathedral. Then gloom once more on the town, like repentance after violence. Castile, here, is a chaos of mountain and of desert. The Guadarrama is steep over the lofty town. The desert leaps and dips in a cacophony of planes. Elsewhere in Spain, it is Spring. But April in Segovia is stormy. The mountains are still clad in winter. In the pockets of the surrounding valley almond trees and cherry are in bloom, making little perfumed furls of mist against the barren earth. The sky is neither spring nor winter. A great wind rages. Momently, heaven changes. Titanic mounds of cloud are flung like eiderdown from peak to peak: the sun is a swift flash between dark purples. Rain in melted diamonds glances across the valley in the oblique shaft of the sun: is gone: a copse of poplar sings suddenly green and yellow under gray. The volumnear motions of the hills seem to be waves of a seismic sea, swept by the wind and roaring with its might. * * * * *