measureless courts and endless corridors.

At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the
gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one
shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the
circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the
advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have
passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than
that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace,
where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly,
as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining
with gold and polished marble.

It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to
eternal death, its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the
dark piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the
edifice. But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest
achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too wholly,
upon this gloomy ideal. The Escorial has been many times described; I
myself forbear with difficulty the attempt to describe it, and I satisfy
my longing to set it visibly before the reader by letting an earlier
visitor of my name describe it for me. I think he does it larger justice
than modern observers, because he escapes the cumulative obligation
which time has laid upon them to find the subjective rather than the
objective fulfilment of its founder's intention in it. At any rate, in
March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission
the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles
Stutart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the Spanish
king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his most delightful
"familiar letters" concerning the Escorial to a friend in London.