The house of Samuel Levy stands, gracious and simple, in its garden. (El Greco lived here.) The arched columns of Santa Maria are unhurt. The Tránsito still breathes, darkly, like a rose over-ripe. It is a rectangular building, higher than wide. Its walls are white under the cedar ceiling. Around runs a frieze, margined in Hebrew texts. Above are arches in relief, _rejas_ that suggest the Arab, and a higher line from the Old Testament. But the base wall of the synagogue is its full glory. It is a façade wholly of Hebrew. (Two Castilian seals thrust in to mar it have no more effect than a spot on a sublime illumined page.) The letters of stone make a warm intricate music. The æsthetic inspiration is Arab. But how these Jews have deepened and dimensioned it! The arabesque is a delicate, wavering line; without denseness, without integration. It is like a silhouette, against a desert sky; it is like the trail of life on desert sands. The Hebrew letters are slower, less emphatic, more volumnear. They are far mellower in curves; they are far deeper. They build, in this façade of a Toledan synagogue, a poem that is history. They march on the stone surface of a wall, resolute, self-effacing: symbols of a world whose spirit seems by miracle to survive its body. Color and aspirant light, throughout Toledo. How has it survived? Not alone the Cristo de la Luz: not alone the Judería. Athwart the Cathedral, in a little Square, is a building--the _Ayuntamiento_--bright, warm, almost fancifully gay with towers. (El Greco builded it.) There are Churches like San Vicente, Santo Tomé, in which a wall grows suddenly glorious in color and sings above the dolorous shadows. (Here, El Greco painted.) Even the Cathedral turns traitor to its stones! The cloisters are a perfumed close. The choir has rows of wood-carved stalls that shout their sensual delight against the heavy columns. And in the Sacristía hangs an altar piece--an _Expolio_--that is a sunny jewel. A genius--from across the sea--has infused this conventional matter with prophetic spirit: space moves, spirit grows manifest in flesh. A red-robed Christ becomes a ritual flame, transfiguring the human shapes about him. And this, in Catholic Toledo, the stone grim city! Because there came a man to dwell here in whom dwelt the old Prophecies, and who resolved them into shapes which Catholic Toledo could not deny. Color against stone, fire against rigor--this had been the Argument in Toledo, until Isabel and Cisneros put a stop to it, by blotting out the one in favor of the other. A simple resolution. Moor and Jew go forth. Dogma and Conventual remain. The Cardinals of Toledo--Popes of Spain--espouse the iron purpose of Castile. And the long blank walls of the streets with their hidden monks and nuns--these seem the victors of Toledo.