Palma. It dates from the first half of the fifteenth
century, when the kings of the island had built up a flourishing
commerce, and expected to rival Genoa and Venice. Its walls, once
crowded with merchants and seamen, are now only opened for the Carnival
balls and other festivals sanctioned by religion. It is a square
edifice, with light Gothic towers at the corners, displaying little
ornamental sculpture, but nevertheless a taste and symmetry, in all its
details, which are very rare in Spanish architecture. The interior is a
single vast hall, with a groined roof, resting on six pillars of
exquisite beauty. They are sixty feet high, and fluted spirally from top
to bottom, like a twisted cord, with a diameter of not more than two
feet and a half. It is astonishing how the airy lightness and grace of
these pillars relieve the immense mass of masonry, spare the bare walls
the necessity of ornament, and make the ponderous roof light as a tent.
There is here the trace of a law of which our modern architects seem to
be ignorant. Large masses of masonry are always oppressive in their
effect; they suggest pain and labor, and the Saracens, even more than
the Greeks, seem to have discovered the necessity of introducing a
sportive, fanciful element, which shall express the delight of the
workman in his work.

In the afternoon, I sallied forth from the western coast-gate, and found
there, sloping to the shore, a village inhabited apparently by sailors
and fishermen. The houses were of one story, flat-roofed, and
brilliantly whitewashed. Against the blue background of the sea, with
here and there the huge fronds of a palm rising from among them, they
made a truly African picture. On the brown ridge above the village were
fourteen huge windmills, nearly all in motion. I found a road leading,
along the brink of the overhanging cliffs, toward the castle of Belver,
whose brown mediaeval turrets rose against a gathering thunder-cloud.
This fortress, built as a palace for the kings of Majorca immediately
after the expulsion of the Moors, is now a prison. It has a superb
situation, on the summit of a conical hill, covered with umbrella-pines.
In one of its round, massive towers, Arago was imprisoned for two months
in 1808. He was at the time employed in measuring an arc of the
meridian, when news of Napoleon's violent measures in Spain reached
Majorca. The ignorant populace immediately suspected the astronomer of
being a spy and political