village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada,
and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of
seventy-four.

I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience
so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me
in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which
was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however
unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I
never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever
the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my
infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so
inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more
or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep
my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should not
always succeed.

Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but
probably it was with my first reading of _Don Quixote_ in the later
eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and,
of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole
of its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish
and then the purpose of some time writing the author's life grew in me
with my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done
either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if I
lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early
chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it
which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not