THE ESCORIAL, AND VERSAILLES
Michaelangelo's dome above St. Peter's Cathedral was finished in 1590. The most majestic crown which ever a metropolitan city wore seems to reach heaven without leaving earth. The reality which it symbolizes has never faded, is alive and forever in consonance with it- self. When the silver trumpets blare down from under its mighty span, they stir hearts which beat in unison with the dead of many gen- erations and with millions of living brethren who in all parts of the world profess the same faith. Pope Sixtus V at whose order the dome was completed, had once been a lowly shepherd boy, and as a Pontiff loved to look at the many roofs outside his window. With Browning he could have said: "How good is life, the mere living"; but he also loved to rule over the living. The successors to his throne, the best of whom have given it increased significance and the worst of whom have not been able to destroy it, have witnessed until now no revolu- tion.
Not far from Madrid the monotonous grandeur of the Escorial rises up over a vast, bare landscape. In this palace Philip II gave form to his idea of world empire but also to his own emotionless, stiff, cold spirit. One is shown a poorly furnished room in which the monarch sat, with his infected leg high up on a support, in an arm-chair under Cellini's great crucifix, and followed divine service at the high altar through an orifice in the wall. The worldly head of the European Counter-reformation could there reflect upon ambitions that had come to naught. The Netherlands had cast off his bloody rule, the ships of the Armada, cumbersome behemoths, had gone out to do battle against the Protestant England of Elizabeth but had been dashed to pieces by the storms. His attempt to establish his own dynasty in France had failed. The Escorial is today a monument to a dream that did not come true.
Visitors to the Palace of Versailles are shown a window from which Louis XVI proclaimed his willingness to bow to the revolutionary will of his people. That day marked the end of the glory which had be- gun with France's victory over Philip, at a rime when a Franco-Spanish league had sought to tear the land asunder from within. Hard pressed.
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