previous next

[218] promising me, that, if I would come to the gardens at five o'clock, all the fountains should play,—a great compliment to me, or rather to my letter of introduction from the Prince Laval. At five o'clock, then, I was there, and soon afterwards the show began. It was a delicious evening, one worthy of the Bay of Naples, and the sun was fast setting behind the mountain, to the westward of us. The village was all assembled in the gardens to see the fete, and added not a little to its picturesque effect, by giving life and movement to the scene. The first exhibition was of sixteen fountains, in a line ascending the hill, and composed of several hundred jets d'eaux, so arranged as to make one coup d'oeil of singular beauty and variety. The setting sun fell upon the whole series, and each had its little rainbow dancing on the white spray it threw up, while the foliage of the trees amidst which it was seen, and which sometimes opened and sometimes closed the view, made it seem the work of enchantment. I thought of the gardens of Armida, and the celestial fountain, which Southey, in his ‘Kehama,’ has formed of the blended and conflicting elements, but for once the reality exceeded the efforts of imagination. I could not be weary with looking at it; but at last my conductor took me by the elbow, and I went to see the fountain of Diana, which is imitated from Versailles, and the most poetical thought I have ever seen in this kind of ornament; but the imitation is finer than the original, the baths of Diana, which is, I suppose, the most magnificent single fountain in the world;. . . . but there was nothing so struck and delighted me as the first coup d'oeil, compared with which all there is at Versailles is a mere awkwardly combined plaything.

. . . . In the morning I rode on to Segovia. . . . . The first thing I did was to present a letter from Count Guaiaqui to the bishop,—a very respectable old man, who from an income of $30,000 a year gives $25,000 to the poor, and denies himself even the common luxury of a coach, which his age and infirmities really require. He gave me his secretary, a lively young Peruvian, for my guide to see the city. . . . The first thing we went to see was the cathedral, a curious and regular mixture of the Gothic and Greek architecture, but otherwise not interesting. The next was the Roman Aqueduct, called by the people ‘Puente del Diablo,’ for they have no idea such a stupendous work could be achieved by a personage of less authority and power. . . . . It begins outside of the city, and traverses the valley on a hundred and fifty-nine arches in the upper row, but not quite so many below, and goes to the hill where stands the castle. It is built of square-hewn stones, united without cement or clamps,


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Versailles (France) (2)
Segovia (Spain) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Diana (2)
Robert Southey (1)
Guaiaqui (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: