Some part of the design is already accomplished to a wonderful
degree. The Indian, the Egyptian, and especially the Arabian, courts are
admirably executed. I never saw or conceived anything so gorgeous as the
Alhambra. There are Byzantine and mediaeval representations, too,--
reproductions of ancient apartments, decorations, statues from tombs,
monuments, religious and funereal,--that gave me new ideas of what
antiquity has been. It takes down one's overweening opinion of the
present time, to see how many kinds of beauty and magnificence have
heretofore existed, and are now quite passed away and forgotten; and to
find that we, who suppose that, in all matters of taste, our age is the
very flower-season of the time,--that we are poor and meagre as to many
things in which they were rich. There is nothing gorgeous now. We live
a very naked life. This was the only reflection I remember making, as we
passed from century to century, through the succession of classic,
Oriental, and mediaeval courts, adown the lapse of time,--seeing all
these ages in as brief a space as the Wandering Jew might glance along
them in his memory. I suppose a Pompeian house with its courts and
interior apartments was as faithfully shown as it was possible to do it.
I doubt whether I ever should feel at home in such a house.
In the pool of a fountain, of which there are several beautiful ones
within the palace, besides larger ones in the garden before it, we saw
tropical plants growing,--large water-lilies of various colors, some
white, like our Concord pond-lily, only larger, and more numerously
leafed.
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