Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/207

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MARRIAGE EMBASSY TO HUNGARY
203

ample of advance in elegant arts, in science, and in all polite and useful literature. The picture here presented has stung the Spaniards to desperation, by its elevation above them. They see glories before them which they never could have created, and these glories appeal to their activity; but their passion for cruelty prevents an imitation or even admiration of those glories. We have infused a feeling, but cannot confer capacity. They desire greatness for themselves; but they reproduce the ferccity of barbarism by the intensity of the one idea that their chosen moral isolation has developed. We have presented to the Spaniards a wealth of scientific acquirement, artistic taste, and splendor of constructive achievement such as no other nation has ever received. Yet a wilderness surrounds the halls of beauty; poverty and degradation bave replaced elegance of attire and of manners; and the howl of the wolf has in wide districts supplanted the cheerful song of the shepherd and the cultivator. We developed one idea in our isolation, and by that one we swept the world before us for a time. Our devotion to one exclusive idea will prove our ruin. The Spaniards in their seclusion have reproduced that love of shedding blood which furnishes a demonstration of the readiness of men to re-exhibit the passion necessary to the isolation of savages, as the result of cultivating that solitude that distinguishes savages. The cold separation of their monasteries has produced some of the most intense examples of this passion.