I am--Christian. It is a wide and deep and high word. When you
ask, "What is it--Christian?" then must each of us answer as it is given
to him to answer. I and thou--and the True, the Universal Christ give us
light!

To-day all Andalusia, all Castile and all Spain to me seemed gray, and
gray the utter Ocean that stretched no man knew where. The gray was the
gray of fetters and of ashes.

The tide made, and as the waves came nearer, eating the sand before
me, they uttered a low crying. _In danger--danger--in danger, Jayme de
Marchena!_

I had been in danger before. Who is not often and always in danger, in
life? But this was a danger to daunt.

Mine were no powerful friends. I had only that which was within me. I
was only son of only son, and my parents and grandparents were dead,
and my distant kindred cold, seeing naught of good in so much study and
thinking of that old, dark, beautiful, questionable one, my grandmother.
I had indeed a remote kinsman, head of a convent in this neighborhood,
and he was a wise man and a kindly. But not he either could do aught
here!

All the Jews to be banished, and Don Pedro with a steady forefinger,
"That man--take him, too! Who does not know that his grandmother was
Jewess, and that he lived with her and drank poison?" But the Dominican,
"No! The Holy Office will take him. You have but to read--only you must
not read--what he has written to see why!"

Gray Ocean, stretching endlessly and now coming close, were it not well
if I drowned myself this gray morning while I can choose the death I
shall die? Now the great murmur sang _Well_, and now it sang Not well.

Low cliff and heaped sand and a solitary bird wide-winging toward the
mountains of Portugal, and the Ocean gray-blue and salt! The salt savor
entered me, and an inner zest came forward and said No, to being
craven. In banishment certainly, in the House of the Inquisition more
doubtfully, the immortal man might yet find market from which to buy! If
the mind could surmount, the eternal quest need not be interrupted--even
there!

Blue Ocean sang to me.

A vision--it came to me at times, vision--set itself in air. I saw
A People who persecuted neither Jew nor thinker. It rose one Figure,
formed of an infinite number of small figures, but all their edges met
in one glow. The figure stood upon the sea and held apart the clouds,
and was free and fair and mighty, and was man and woman melted together,
and it took all colors