GRANADA.

HISTORIANS, travellers, novelists, poets,-all have spoken with earnest admiration of the surpassing natural beauty and richness of Granada, and its lovely Vega; but it is impossible for language to do justice to the exquisiteness of the reality. Surrounded on all sides by picturesque hills graduually swelling into mountains along the distant horizon, watered by abundant streams, and sprinkled over with numerous villages, the Vega is in itself delightful as a perfect garden of verdure and fertility, independently of the fascinating associations attached to the numerous edifices and public monuments of Granada. The city stands on the edge of the Vega, just where melt away the mountains, from whence the rivers Darro and Xenil derive their limpid currents,-and where the Darro, after passing through the city, is united with and lost in the Xenil, which then carries off their blended waters across the Vega, to enter the Guadalquivir at Ecija. Crowning the levelled summit of a steep and lofty

hill, which advances a little from the mountains into the city, stands the Fortress of the Alhambra, consisting of a citadel or fortified enclosure, with strong towers rising from distance to distance above its walls. The elevation, on which the Fortress is built, descends abruptly to the Darro and the quarter of Albayzin on the one side, and on the other is separated by a deep ravine from another similar but smaller peak, surmounted in like manner with huge square towers, which, when viewed from the distant Vega, seem blended with the fortifications on the sister height. They are the famous Vermilion Towers, which frown in gloomy grandeur over the domes and spires of Granada. In the rear, the Alhambra is divided by a deep broad valley from the gardens of the Generalife, which rise along the side of the mountain towards the naked elevation called Silla del Moro. The Fortress of the Alhambra, therefore, occupies the table of an insulated conical height, a lofty acropolis, which, although liable to be commanded by a battery erected on the elevations behind it, was impregnable by any of the means of attack known in the age of its construction. And within the dark walls and lofty towers of this remarkable fortress you find the perfection of Arabian art, and the paradise of Numidian fancy, the romantic beauties of the Moorish palace of the Alhambra.

It was a delicious day in early spring, when the sun shone out with lustre and warmth, it is true,

but not with the overpowering heat of his summer radiance. All nature was awakening from the brief repose, which alone she needs or obtains in that balmy climate, where vegetation never entirely forsakes the earth. It was now reviving in all the brilliancy of vernal beauty; and while the soil was resuming its bright green vesture, and the luxurious vines clustered around the crumbling fragments of the ruined towers, and the almond trees filled the air with the grateful fragrance of their rich blossoms, a gentle breeze floated over the city, just freshened to the sense by its passing acquaintance with the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada.

I had consumed the morning of the day in delightedly examining the various interesting objects within the walls of the Alhambra. Ascending the Torre de la Vela, which overtops the very edge of the precipitous height, like a mural crown on the brow of a warrior, and which thus looks down upon the subjacent masses of the crowded city,-I had stretched my gaze over the enchanting Vega, from the distant towers of Santa Fé on the right, which Isabel raised up as if by sorcery to confound the disheartened Moors, far along to Mount Padul on the left, where the dethroned and exiled Boabdeli took his last agonizing look of the home of his fathers. I had trod the magnificent circular court of the palace, which Charles Fifth, in a moment of excited admiration at the amenity of climate, richness of

resources, and picturesque situation of Granada had begun, but which still remains only a splendid ruin, used for no purpose but as a magazine of superfluous artillery and ammunition. From the Myrtle Court with its cool reservoir and odoriferous borders, to the Royal Boudoir overlooking the straits of the Darro and the populous hill-side beyond it,-and from the Embassadors' Hall to the subterranean Baths and the secret passages protected by the Roman nymphs, I had visited every quadrangle and every apartment and every curious recess of the royal residence of the Alhambra.

Fatigued with my perambulations, overcome in some degree by that weariness of seeing, which af fects the senses and the nerves on such occasions, whether you are admiring the gallery of the Louvre or the curiosities of the Alhambra, I had retired into the beautiful Court of Lions, to collect my thoughts and muse for a moment on what I had seen. As I reclined on a marble seat in one of the alcoves or dormitories of an apartment, opening into this court, where the murder of the Abencerrages is supposed to have been perpetrated, the softness of the air and the murmurs of the fountains combined with my lassitude to produce a heaviness of feeling, which I could not resist.

The great bell of the Cathedral, which strikes a plegaria, or mid-day prayer, at the hour of three, because at that moment the Moorish capital was given up to Ferdinand and Isabel, was dying away

on my ear, as I lost my consciousness of surrounding objects and insensibly fell into a deep but unquiet slumber. As occasionally happens when the mind is filled with a single engrossing subject, my sleeping thoughts lingered around the scenes where I rested, and conjured up before me a thousand confused images of events, half real and half imaginary, associated with the diverse fortunes of the Alhambra, containing too much of fact to be treated wholly as a dream, and too much of fiction to admit of being ascribed to the exclusive agency of the memory. And although my thoughts, or fancies, or visions if they better deserve the name, being invested with much of the indistinctness and obscurity common to dreams, seemed to shift from scene to scene by indefinable transitions, yet on reflecting afterwards upon the whole, I could not deny that imagination and recollection had united their magic influence, to raise before my mind's eye a sort of moving phantasmagoria of the real fortunes of Granada.

Methought a dense shade of ancient oaks and venerable forest trees of various kinds was spread out before me, broken only by scattered spots, where an imperfect culture scantily aided the productions of the chase in ministering to the wants of man. I stood upon a lofty height, one of several steep hills, the spurs of a broad range of mountains behind, reaching forward like a promontory into the