The pavilions of the Court of Lions, and the halls which open into it, on either side, approach the nearest to their original perfection.  The floors are marble, the wainscoting of painted tiles, the walls of embroidery, still gleaming with the softened lustre of their original tints, and the lofty conical domes seem to be huge sparry crystalizations, hung with dropping stalactites, rather than any work of the human hand.  Each of these domes is composed of five thousand separate pieces, and the pendent prismatic blocks, colored and gilded, gradually resolve themselves, as you gaze, into the most intricate and elegant designs.  But you must study long ere you have won all the secret of their beauty.  To comprehend them, one should spend a whole day, lying on his back, under each one.  Mateo spread his cloak for me in the fountain in the Hall of the Abencerrages, over the blood-stains made by the decapitation of those gallant chiefs, and I lay half an hour looking upward:  and this is what I made out of the dome.  From its central pinnacle hung the chalice of a flower with feathery petals, like the “crape myrtle” of our Southern States Outside of this, branched downward the eight rays of a large star, whose points touched the base of the dome; yet the star was itself composed of flowers, while between its rays and around its points fell a shower of blossoms, shells, and sparry drops.  From the base of the dome hung a gorgeous pattern of lace, with a fringe of bugles, projecting into eight points so as to form a star of drapery, hanging from the points of the flowery star in the dome.  The spaces between the angles were filled with masses of stalactites, dropping one below the other, till they tapered into the plain square sides of the hall.

In the Hall of the Two Sisters, I lay likewise for a considerable time, resolving its misty glories into shape.  The dome was still more suggestive of flowers.  The highest and central piece was a deep trumpet-flower, whose mouth was cleft into eight petals.  It hung in the centre of a superb lotus-cup, the leaves of which were exquisitely veined and chased.  Still further below swung a mass of mimosa blossoms, intermixed with pods and lance-like leaves, and around the base of the dome opened the bells of sixteen gorgeous tulips.  These pictures may not be very intelligible, but I know not how else to paint the effect of this fairy architecture.

In Granada, as in Seville and Cordova, one’s sympathies are wholly with the Moors.  The few mutilated traces which still remain of their power, taste, and refinement, surpass any of the monuments erected by the race which conquered them.  The Moorish Dynasty in Spain was truly, as Irving observes, a splendid exotic, doomed never to take a lasting root in the soil It was choked to death by the native weeds; and, in place of lands richly cultivated and teeming with plenty, we now have barren and-almost depopulated wastes—­in place of education, industry,