born burghers who gave the kings of Aragon
and of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king who
was so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes of
Barcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament assembled.)
This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with the
reawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in the
Catalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in the
resurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language.

Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufactures
that were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. They
had first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and of
ancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race during
centuries of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps the
symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, the
dragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance
will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life of
the huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first men
conscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to make
permanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of the
mist-capped mountains and the changing sea.

Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five years
after the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in
Barcelona writing for newspapers,--as far as one can gather, a
completely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certain
amount of political agitation in the cause of the independence of
Catalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_un
maitre_" the French would have called him.

Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young nobleman, a
poet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainment
before the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through many
moonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenly
and she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him her
breasts, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple with
cancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before his
eyes had turned all his passion inward and would have made him a saint
had his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramon Lull
lived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which he
sought