1831.] Recollections of Scejies and Cities. 239 



able ; but the solitude and silence, and deep shadows within the walls, 

 had their own peculiar charms, and I walked through the dusky courts, 

 and in and out among the shadows, and the streams of moonlight that 

 fell through the arches. 1 little thought then how great a providence 

 it was that I slept that night at Arreau. Next day, with the sun for 

 my guide, I returned to the ruin, and saw, in the inner court, over 

 which a deep shadow had been thrown the night before, my foot-prints 

 on the long grass, and that I had stepped over the corner of a well, 

 whose dusky depth the eye was unable to fathom ! I experienced a 

 strange pleasure in visiting this spot, once, at least, every day, while I 

 remained in its neighbourhood. 



The Pyi'enees I had always figured to myself as widely differing from 

 the Alps, and so I found it to be : but the difference does not arise 

 solely from the diversity in the features of nature, but more from the 

 one being a travelled, the other an untravelled country — instead of the 

 wide smooth roads, along which the nervous may roll in their cushioned 

 carriages, it is well if, in the Pyrenees, the road affords picking for the 

 wary foot of the mule. In place of the stately hotel, with its luxurious 

 beds, recherche dinners, and scrupulous cleanliness, the Pyrenees offer 

 lo the traveller the house of reception, which holds a rank somewhere 

 between the low French auberge and the Spanish venia. A brick floor, 

 upon which one walks knee-deep in fleas, a clothless table, a curtainless 

 mattrass, and a bit of smoked izard, come in place of the luxuries that 

 are found in the Ej^ee at Zurich, the Fancon at Berne, or the Trois Cou- 

 ronnes of Vevay. In the Pyrenees no snug boxes — half villas, are to 

 be seen, as in the Alpine valleys ; the abodes of those absentees who 

 have transplanted the detached cottage from Claphara to the valley of 

 Interlaken, or the sloping banks of fair Leman. Nor do we meet any 

 where in the Pyrenees, as we do at every turn in the Alps, those tra- 

 velling Messieurs Anglais who cut so conspicuous a figure, with their 

 broad straw hats, knapsacks, guides, and pointed staves. The lover of 

 nature is well quit of all these. But let me cross the Pyrenees without 

 the aid of guide or stave, and glean some images from the land of wild 

 fancies and dreaming thoughts. 



In all the countries of Europe, save Spain and Turkey, our recollec- 

 tions are in a great measure similar — in all of them one meets horses 

 and carriages, and travellers — in all of them we find good inns, and 

 comfortable dinners, and obsequious attendance, and in all of them 

 women wear hats or bonnets, coloured dresses, and shew' their faces. 

 But our recollections of Spain are of a peculiar and totally distinct cha- 

 racter. Trains of mules winding down a mountain path, and in and out 

 among the thickets of Ilex and Algarobo ; silky milk-white goats, and 

 the goatlierd asleep, beneath a edge of aloes or prickly pear ; ragged 

 urchins, with bare feet and brown shaven hair, lying under a cork-tree, 

 eating a loaf; brown visaged men, with tattered cloaks, sitting in the 

 shadow of a high wall, slicing melons ; pairs, or groups of Franciscans, 

 loitering about their convent gates ; the strange odour wafted among 

 the wilds from fields of aromatic plants ; the thrum of the guitar, 

 and the tic-a-tic-tic of the castanet; dark-eyed women, with mantilla 

 and veil, glancing from the saint at whose altar they kneel to the 

 stranger who enters the church ; tall peasants trampling among rose- 

 mary bushes, witli long gun and lank dog ; bright green and golden- 

 speckled orange-groves, and their delicious fragrance ; clumps of the 



