tops of the
intervening buildings, and finally a turn in the street brought us to the
ancient Moorish gateway on the northern side. This is an admirable
specimen of the horse-shoe arch, and is covered with elaborate tracery. It
originally opened into the court, or _haram_, of the mosque, which still
remains, and is shaded by a grove of orange trees. The Giralda, to my eye,
is a more perfect tower than the Campanile of Florence, or that of San
Marco, at Venice, which is evidently an idea borrowed from it. The Moorish
structure, with a base of fifty feet square, rises to the height of two
hundred and fifty feet. It is of a light pink color, and the sides, which
are broken here and there by exquisitely proportioned double Saracenic
arches, are covered from top to bottom with arabesque tracery, cut in
strong relief. Upon this tower, a Spanish architect has placed a tapering
spire, one hundred feet high, which fortunately harmonizes with the
general design, and gives the crowning grace to the work.

The Cathedral of Seville may rank as one of the grandest Gothic piles in
Europe. The nave lacks but five feet of being as high as that of St.
Peter's, while the length and breadth of the edifice are on a commensurate
scale. The ninety-three windows of stained glass fill the interior with a
soft and richly-tinted light, mellower and more gentle than the sombre
twilight of the Gothic Cathedrals of Europe. The wealth lavished on the
smaller chapels and shrines is prodigious, and the high altar, inclosed
within a gilded railing fifty feet high, is probably the most enormous
mass of wood-carving in existence. The Cathedral, in fact, is encumbered
with its riches. While they bewilder you as monuments of human labor and
patience, they detract from the grand simplicity of the building. The
great nave, on each side of the transept, is quite blocked up, so that the
choir and magnificent royal chapel behind it have almost the effect of
detached edifices.

We returned again this morning, remaining two hours, and succeeded in
making a thorough survey, including a number of trashy pictures and
barbarously rich shrines. Murillo's "Guardian Angel" and the "Vision of
St. Antonio" are the only gems. The treasury contains a number of sacred
vessels of silver, gold and jewels--among other things, the keys of
Moorish Seville, a cross made of the first gold brought from the New-World
by Columbus, and another from that robbed in Mexico by Cortez. The