THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
But he made me feel his poetic enthusiasm for the great American Republic, and the fervor of his wish that the champions of human liberty would triumph over the uprising of the slave-holders. There was something in his being that created a sympathetic atmosphere around him. The timbre of his voice touched the nerves with a peculiar caressing effect, and I can well imagine how the poetic flights of his eloquence, poured forth by that voice in the most gorgeously musical of all languages, could produce among his hearers a certain intoxication of feeling which, while the spell lasted, made them forget all differences of opinion. With these impressions of Castelar still vivid in my mind, I found it quite intelligible when I read, at a later period, of the commotions his eloquence achieved in the Cortes; how, after he had closed a speech, even the deputies of the opposition would jump up from their seats, rush down upon him to embrace and kiss him, and break out in thundering cheers for the “hijo de España,” the son of Spain, and then, a few hours later, pronounce against him when the question was put to a vote. At the time when I knew him, a little volume of his speeches appeared in print, which he presented to me as a keepsake, with an inscription by his own hand.
According to custom, the diplomatic corps followed the Court to the Queen's summer residence, La Granja at San Ildefonso, and thence to the Escorial, where the Queen was to stop a few days for the purpose of visiting the tombs of her ancestors and doing penance. Of the “opera bouffe” part of my diplomatic life in Spain, those days formed the climax. Here was the Escorial palace, looking like a huge penitentiary in somber gray stone, surmounted by a majestic church cupola—the whole edifice breathing the atmosphere of the gloomy and terrible Philip II, the devout and bloody executioner of the Inquisition,—in it a little balcony overlooking the interior
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