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nearest I could occasionally catch the tones of the organ and the choir, while from the most remote the tolling of the bell had almost died away before it reached me in the intervals of the morning breeze.
All was in harmony,—the hour, the season, and the scene; and when the sun rose, it rose on one of the most splendid and glorious prospects in the world.1
The old Archbishop was delighted at breakfast-time to find I had been again at the Alhambra, for in his veneration for this wonderful ruin he is little better than a Mahometan.
He sent me out, however, directly afterwards, with his rude kind of hospitality, to see the city itself.
It is a good city, like any other, with a few fine houses belonging to the nobility; but what most struck me was the Moorish character so often apparent.
I first noticed it in the curious form, arrangement, and splendor of the silk market, which is substantially as it was in the fifteenth century; afterwards in the more showy and rich dresses of the people, in the paintings on the outside of their houses, or in the minute and delicate ornaments of their architecture, and in the awnings over their courts, in their verandas, and in the profusion of waters distributed through their houses, so that they sometimes have a jet d'eau in every room.
The last thing in which I noticed it was in their language, as in their salutation, ‘Dios guarde a vin,’ and in their accent, which makes an h guttural, as in Alhambra, Alhama, harto, etc., all which are completely Moorish; as well as a general tone perceptible in the ways and dress of the common people.
At dinner, the Archbishop had invited a good many persons to meet me, and thus made the last hours of my visit to Granada pleasant, for I was obliged to go away this very evening (September 25). I would have stayed until the morning, though only to rest myself, but the ‘Corzarios,’ or company that trades between Granada and Malaga, set off at five o'clock, and the roads are so infested with robbers that no other mode of travelling is safe.
We commenced our march, therefore, about thirty strong, with about an hundred mules of burden and
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1 In a letter to Mr. Daveis, December 5, 1818, Mr. Ticknor says: ‘The Alhambra, a name which will make my blood thrill if I live to the frosts of a century, not that the pleasure I received, on wandering over the immense extent of these most graceful and most picturesque of all ruins, was like the quiet, hallowed delight of a solitary, secret visit to the Coliseum or the Forum, when the moonbeams slept upon the wrecks of three empires and twenty-five hundred years, for it was nothing of all this; but it was a riotous, tumultuous pleasure, which will remain in my memory, like a kind of sensual enjoyment, as long as it has vivacity enough to recall the two days I passed amidst this strange enchantment.’
Boston, J. R. Osgood and company, 1876.
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