Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Romantic Legends of Spain, tr. Cornelia Francis Bates and Katherine Lee Bates (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1909), 76:
My sketches were making but little progress. In that cloister of San Juan de los Reyes, in that cloister so mysterious and bathed in so profound a melancholy,—seated on the broken capital of a column, my portfolio on my knees, my elbows on my portfolio, and my head between my hands,—to the music of water which flows there with an incessant murmur, to the rustling of leaves under the evening wind in the wild, forsaken garden, what dreams did I not dream of that window and that woman! I knew her; I knew her name and even the color of her eyes.
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I would see her crossing the wide and lonely courts of that most ancient house, rejoicing them with her presence as a sunbeam gilds a pile of ruins. Again I would seem to see her in a garden of very lofty, very shadowy walls, among colossal, venerable trees, such as there ought to be at the back of that sort of Gothic palace where she lived, gathering flowers and seating herself alone on a stone bench and there sighing while she plucked them leaf from leaf thinking on—who knows? Perchance on me. Why say perchance? Assuredly on me. Oh, what dreams, what follies, what poetry did that window awaken in my soul while I abode at Toledo!
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| Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes, 19th August, 2026 |
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