power of Granada was weakened by internal dissensions, and its downfall hastened by the intervention of a Spanish Esther, Isabel de Solis, who, being the daughter of the governor of Martos, was taken prisoner, and became the favoured wife of Abu-lhasar, King of Granada. She was called by the Moors, from her beauty, Zoraya, that is, "Morning Star ;" and Ayeshah, another of the monarch's wives, becoming her rival, the court was divided into two factions-the Zegris, (Arragonese, from Thegr, or Arragon,) who sided with Ayesha, and the Abencerrages, (Beni Cerraj, children of the saddle,) who took part with Zoraya. The king was, in 1482, dethroned by his son, the child of Ayesha, Abu-Abdilla, altered by the Spaniards into Boabdilla, who was also called by the Moors As-Saghir, the younger, to distinguish him from his father, a name which the Spaniards fashioned into el Rey chico. On the termination of the celebrated siege of Granada, in 1492, this prince surrendered his kingdom to Ferdinand, on conditions that he and his people should be permitted to live unmolested in the Alpujarras-conditions which were only regarded with Punic faith. The spot is still shown from which, as he retired, he, for the last time, saw his proud city of Granada and its peerless Alhambra, and is to this day named El ultimo sospiro del Moro. As the tears gushed from his eyes, his haughty mother uttered the reproach, "Thou dost well to weep like a woman, for that which thou hast not defended like a man." We may observe that the appellation "Moors" was given by the Spaniards to the Arabs, because, although they hated them religiously as infidels, they held them in veneration as Morosgentlemen and soldiers. After the fall of Granada, they were named, with a contemptuous diminutive, Mo. riscos. The first commencement of the Alhambra is of unknown antiquity. A building there is mentioned, in a. D. 864, by an Arabian poet as "kal-'atal-hamra," "the red castle." The name is derived from the Arabic "Amhar," (in the feminine "hamra,") red, from the colour of the material of which it is built. When the Moor * ish kings made Granada their residence, they built on this spot their Alcassar, or palace, hence called the Kasni-l-hamra. The fortress palace, of which the remains still exist, and which thus acquired its name, was commenced by Ibna-l-ahmar, in 1248, and the work was carried on by his son, and completed by his grandson, Mohammed III. in 1314. Yusuf I. was, about 1348, its great decorator, being a monarch of peaceful tastes, and having vast resources. Its decline dates from the conquest of Granada. The very next day the monks commenced what they called their purifications, and the taking down the Moslem symbols. It suffered almost as much from the Flemish alterations of Charles V. and subsequently partook of the decay of the Spanish monarchy. Richard Wall, an Irishman, and minister of Charles III. saved it from utter ruin by having it repaired. The Spaniards, with strong prejudices and little taste, have treated it either with abhorrence or neglect; and it nearly received its final overthrow from those modern Vandals, the French -a term of reproach, which they may thank their leaders for having brought .upon them; and which, as now applied, is probably much more unjust to the Vandals than to them. They levelled the Moorish palace of the Mufti and La casa de los Viudas, to make an exercising ground; tore up the blue and white pavement in the Court of Lions, in the Alhambra, to turn it into a garden; mined its graceful towersblew up eight of them—all beautiful— and purposed to have destroyed the rest (the holes made by their miners are there still), but were happily compelled to depart. The ruin to which this magnificent building has been exposed by the negligence of every successive government, and the vile uses to which its rich halls have been applied, are told, and for the first time, by Mr. Ford, who collected his information during a two months' residence within its walls. How surpassing must have been its splendour when there still remains enough to make it the wonder of Spain! "Alhambram, proh! dii immortales!" said Peter Martyr, who entered it in the train of its conquerors, "qualem Regiam! unicam in orbe terrarum crede !"* Cited from the Hand-Book, p. 374. The Alhambra crowns the hill on which Granada is built. The lines of its walls and towers follow the curves and dips of the ground, and "hence," observes Mr. Ford, "the elegance and picturesqueness of those oriental fortifications." Its filigree towers rise from out a deep girdle of trees, which contrast well with the barren sierras above. "The wooded slopes," adds our author, "are kept green by watercourses, and tenanted by nightingales." Granada, with her thousand fountains, is supplied with a waste of waters, the Darro and Xenil being drawn off from near their sources far above the town. The grand entrance to the palace is by La Torre de la Justicia, the gate of judgment, where the king, as in the east, heard causes. passage is through a double gate."David," as our author cites, "sat between the two gates." The guardroom is here, where now, "instead of the well-appointed Mameluke, and glittering Moor, or iron-clad champion of Tendilla, a few gaunt, halfstarved, bandit-looking invalids are huddled together, need starving in their eyes, their only uniform being ragged misery." The "The severe and almost forbidding exterior of the Alhambra, gives no promise of the Aladdin gorgeousress which once shone within, when the opening of a single door admitted the stranger into an almost paradise. In common with other Moorish commanding Alcazares, it is built on the crest of a hill, and of tapia. The picturesque walls and towers which fringe the heights, follow the natural lines of the uneven ground. This fortress-palace, the dwelling of an oriental, was intended to awe the city below, to keep out heat, enemies, foreign and domestic, and to keep in women. The plain aspect was adopted to avert the effects of the evil-eye, which scowls on the over-prosperous, and mars their felicity. The interior voluptuousness and splendour were masked, like the glittering spar in a coarse pebble.Thus, while the Spanish palace was all external ostentation, and internal imperfection, the Moor's motto was 'esse quam videri;' content with the substance within, he was free from the vanity of displaying a whitened sepulchre to the world. ness, and a non-reception of vermin; above which hung the rich Artesonado roof, gilded and starred, like a heaven, over the glorious saloons. The architecture of the Arabs,' says Owen Jones, 'is essentially religious, and the offspring of the Koran, as Gothic architecture is of the Bible. The prohibition to represent animal life, caused them to seek for other means of decoration-inscriptions from the Koran, interwoven with geometrical ornaments and flowers, not drawn decidedly from nature, but translated through the loom; for it would seem that the Arabs in changing their wandering for a settled life, in striking the tent to plant it in a form more solid, had transferred the luxurious shawls and hangings of Cashmere, which had adorned their former dwellings, to their new, changing the tent-pole for a marble column, and the silken tissue for gilded plaster;' and, certainly, he might have added that the palm tree was the type of the columns which they used in their patios."— p. 372. The slender palm-like pillars, with every variety of capital, are of white marble, but in the time of the Moors were all gilt, save that the ornaments on the mouldings were painted, the ground blue, and the ornament the white of the marble. It would be in vain for us to attempt a description of the rich details and endless variety of Arabian architecture, its Artesonado ceilings and honeycomb stalactical pendentives, its Azulejo pillars, and dados and frets, its shutter and door marqueterie, and the intricacies of its infinite patterns we cannot, even with our limits, accomplish the less hopeless, but still difficult task of portraying its grander features, its saloons, corridors, mezquita or mosque, baths and courts. In the hall of the ambassadors was the Khalif's throne. The thickness of the walls may be judged of from Mr. Ford's remark, that the windows are so deeply recessed as to look like cabinets, or the lateral chapels of a cathedral. The prospect from this saloon is one of the finest in Spain. "Ill-fated the man," said Charles V. "who lost all this." Another of the halls, La sala de los Abencerrages, is so called from the massacre of the Abencerrages, by Boabdil, having been perpetrated here." The slender pillars of the alcove explains," says Mr. Ford, "how Sampson pulled down the support of the house of Dagon." The Sala de Justicia has received its appellation from its painted ceiling, which represents the Moors in divan, and has thus the additional interest of giving their true costume. The Sala las dos Hermanas, the Hall of the two Sisters, is named from the two sister slabs of a rare Macael marble, which are let into its pavement. This, which was part of the private apartments of the Moorish kings, is preeminent in symmetry and beauty. At the end of the saloon is a ventana, or window, remarkable for its elegance, looking into one of the many courts which were rich in graceful ornaments, cool with abounding fountains of clear water, and ever-green with myrtle and cypress. Here was the boudoir of the sultana, "in which," says our author, 66 poetry and art exhausted all their efforts, all the varieties of form and colour which adorn other portions of the palace are here united.” Such," says Mr. Ford, concluding his full and clear account of the great Arabian edifice, from which, mainly, we have gleaned our little knowledge; "such is the alhambra, in its decayed and fallen state, the carcase of what it was when vivified by a living soul, and now the tomb, not the home of the Moor. It may disappoint those who, fonder of the present and a cigar, than of the past and the abstract, arrive heated with the hill, and are thinking of getting back to an ice, a dinner, and a siesta. Again, the nonsense of annuals has fostered an over-exaggerated notion of a place, which, from the dreams of boyhood, has been fancy-formed as a fabric of the genii. Few airy castles of illusion will stand the prosaic test of reality, and no where less than in Spain. But to understand the alhambra, it must be lived in, and beheld in the semi-obscure evening, so beautiful of itself in the South, and when ravages are less apparent than when flouted by the gay day glare. On a stilly summer night all is again given up to the past 66 and to the Moor; then, when the moon, Dian's bark of pearl, floats above it in the air, like his crescent symbol, the tender beam heals the scars, and makes them contribute to the sentiment of widowed loneliness. The wan rays tip the filigree arches, and give a depth to the shadows, and a misty undefined magnitude to the saloons beyond, which sleep in darkness and silence, broken only by the drony flight of some bat. The reflections in the ink-black tank, glitter like subaqueous palaces of Undines; as we linger in the recesses of the windows, below lies Granada, with its busy hum, and the lights sparkle like stars on the obscure Albaicin, as if we were looking down on the reversed firmament. The baying of the dog, and the tingling of the guitar, indicating life there, increase the desolation of the Alhambra. Then, in proportion as all here around is dead, do the fancy and imagination become alive. The halls and courts seem to expand to a larger size; the shadows of the cypresses on the walls assume the forms of the dusky Moor, revisiting his lost home in the glimpses of the moon, while the night winds, breathing through the unglazed windows and myrtles, rustle as his silken robes, or sigh like his lament over the profanation of the unclean infidel and the destroyer."-pp. 380, 381.* The writer of such passages needs no praising to commend him to the public, much less are we called upon to apologise for having made him speak so often for himself. It has been our desire to do justice to a work, which coming forward with a modest name, exhibits a mass and variety of fresh knowledge rare in these compiling days, and whose smallest merit is a charm of manner. have, from the nature of our notice, presented it but imperfectly; yet, in parting from Mr. Ford, we speak, we are sure, our reader's feelings as well as our own, when we express a hope that he may be induced to give We Murphy's "Arabian Antiquities" is the only work on the Alhambra, which, until lately, was known to English readers. We were never able to rate it highly, although it is much praised by Dibdin, in his Library Companion, and by so excellent a judge as Sir Walter Scott. It is copied from an old Spanish work, entitled Atiqudades Arabes ;" and, as Mr. Ford says, is so inaccurate as to suggest a doubt whether Murphy was ever on the spot. Far superior to it is the "Erinerungen," of Von Gail of Munich, and the still more splendid work of F M. Hessemer, Berlin, 1836; but they all fade, as Mr. Ford assures us, before the English publication of Owen Jones, "Plans of the Alhambra." London. 1842. "The scrupulous architectural and artistical accuracy of which is rivalled by its gorgeous execution." us the notes of his travels in other lands he has exhausted the subject of Spain. It is impossible to rise from the examination of so elaborate a work on Spain, and to behold her present state of anarchy, fusion, and confusion, without asking the question—is there a prospect of her regeneration? We, as yet, see none-not even the small cloud in the horizon, the harbinger of coming plenty and returning health. Half Arabs as they are, the Spaniards retain that oriental trait, the sto quipermanence in habits-be they good or bad-and theirs are mostly of the latter quality. The kingdom which, as we have said, has never been well consolidated, has at all times been overrun with robbers and smugglers, now the only industrious sections of its people, except the muleteers, who deal with both. Partially emancipated from superstition, the Spaniards are trending to infidelity; education is making no way among them, and in politics their prevailing creed is that wild liberalism which in all countries is less allied to liberty than to oppression.* Thus, with some knowledge of the resources of Spain, and no disposition to undervalue the good points of her people, we are still compelled to regard her as a dead nation, obliterated from among the powers of Europe, and have no faith to write on the proud tablet which tells of her buried greatness, the word Resurgam. THE TRAVELS OF THE LEAF. FROM THE FRENCH. "De la tige detachee Pauvre feuille desechee, &c." From the hill to the valley, the grove to the plain, I know not I heed not-I go with the blast, I haste to where all things in nature are hieing And the sweet garden rose-leaf floats off with the breeze- And it may be to glad me—it may be to rue— CECIL. "I hate oppression in every shape," said a Spanish Liberal-a good specimen of the genus to Lord Caernarvon; "I am a friend to the human race; if, indeed, there be a Jew among us, burn him, I say, burn him alive." POETICAL REMAINS OF THE LATE MRS. JAMES GRAY.NO. VI. "Thou hast left sorrow in thy song, A voice not loud but deep; "Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground Now peace the woman's heart hath found MRS. HEMANS. [SOME of the poems in our present Series, as well as two or three in that immediately preceding, expressing, as they do, feelings altogether private and personal, we should have hardly deemed ourselves justified in printing, had we not the express sanction of the one to whom they were addressed-Mrs. Gray's nearest friend. The records of affection, pure and blameless, intended merely for the gratification of some sympathetic bosom, would naturally claim reserve or suppression; were it not that the feelings which we hide so jealously while we are alive, rarely enter their appeal against a posthumous declaration. Here, there is danger neither of ridicule nor mistake. The bounds have been traversed, and not vainly. Over the wide gulf set between us and the Departed, no uncharitable sentence can wing its way; and we listen, with calm and subdued attention, to accents floating upward to us from the tomb, whose expression from the Living would, perhaps, have been encountered with the keen edge of satire only. We have many love-poems written by men; and our own language, magnificent in its wealth, ranks such efforts among its highest lyrical triumphs. Even in the coarseness of elder times, it is memorable to hearken to the cavalier and courtier, the wit and scholar, confessing in language most musically soft their subjugation to the all-absorbing passion. A refinement, at other times halfunknown, came upon them at such seasons; and the very hope of being deemed worthy of acceptance would seem to have in itself created the required worthiThe verses of Surrey and Sidney, of Raleigh and Waller, of Ben Jonson, Herrick, and a host of others, will recur at once to the memory, and start to the lip for quotation. And a yet higher name than any, we have in that of the great dramatist, who, in his sonnets, speaks to us as "one of ourselves," with all our own hopes and regrets-witness that touching one in which he bids his love forget him, lest recollection itself should bring reproach or pain. ness. "No longer mourne for me when I am dead, Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest wormes to dwell: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe. O if (I say) you looke upon this verse When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay, Doe not so much as my poore name reherse, But let your love even with my life decay; Least the wise world should looke into your mone, This is true poetry, worthy the revelation of that "higher mood" which empties the human heart wholly of self, and in its stead infuses a devotion to an outer object, to last for a life-time. Unfortunately, however, all such strains have been in our own day so unplatonized, that degradation no less deep than deserved has followed; and the |