oung man who had just
gained an appointment with great difficulty because of his liberal
ideas, resigned out of solidarity with the rest. In 1868 came the
liberal revolution which was the political expression of this whole
movement, and all these professors were reinstated. Until the
restoration of the Bourbons in '75 Spain was a hive of modernization,
Europeanization.

Returned to power Orovio lost no time in republishing his decrees of a
profession of faith. Giner, Ascarate, Salmeron and several others were
arrested and exiled to distant fortresses when they protested; their
friends declared themselves in sympathy and lost their jobs, and many
other professors resigned, so that the university was at one blow
denuded of its best men. From this came the idea of founding a free
university which should be supported entirely by private subscription.
From that moment the life of Giner de los Rios was completely entwined
with the growth of the Institucion Libre de Insenanza, which developed
in the course of a few years into a coeducational primary school. And
directly or indirectly there is not a single outstanding figure in
Spanish life to-day whose development was not largely influenced by
this dark slender baldheaded old man with a white beard whose picture
one finds on people's writing desks.

... Oh, si, llevad, amigos,
su cuerpo a la montana
a los azules montes
del ancho Guadarrama,

wrote his pupil, Antonio Machado--and I rather think Machado is the
pupil whose name will live the longest--after Don Francisco's death in
1915.

... Yes, carry, friends
his body to the hills
to the blue peaks
of the wide Guadarrama.
There are deep gulches
of green pines where the wind sings.
There is rest for his spirit
under a cold live oak
in loam full of thyme, where play
golden butterflies....
There the master one day
dreamed new flowerings for Spain.

These are fragments from an elegy by Juan Ramon Jimenez, another
poet-pupil of Don Francisco:

"Don Francisco.... It seemed that he summed up all that is tender
and keen in life: flowers, flames, birds, peaks, children.... Now,
stretched on his bed, like a frozen river that perhaps still flows
under the ice, he is the clear path for endless recurrence.... He
was like a living statue of himself, a statue of earth, of wind, of
water, of fire. He had so freed himself from the husk of eve