palms and pomegranates, flowering plants and shrubs, through which winding walks of gravel have been laid.  From the steps of the gateway to the tomb is a vista about a hundred feet wide paved with white and black marble with tessellated designs, inclosed with walls of cypress boughs.  In the center are a series of tanks, or marble basins, fed from fountains, and goldfish swim about in the limpid water.  This vista, of course, was intended to make the first view as impressive as possible, and it is safe to say that there is no other equal to it.  At the other end of the marble-paved tunnel of trees, against a cloudless sky, rises the most symmetrical, the most perfect, perhaps the only faultless human structure in existence.  At first one is inclined to be a little bewildered, a little dazed, as if the senses were paralyzed, and could not adjust themselves to this “poem in marble,” or “vision in marble,” or “dream in marble,” as poets and artists have rhapsodized over it for four centuries.

No building has been more often described and sketched and painted and photographed.  For three hundred and fifty years it has appeared as an illustration in the chapter on India in geographies, atlases and gazetteers; it is used as a model in architectural text-books, and of course is reproduced in every book that is written about India.  It has been modeled in gold, silver, alabaster, wax and every other material that yields to the sculptor’s will, yet no counterfeit can ever give a satisfactory idea of its loveliness, the purity of the material of which it is made, the perfection of its proportions, the richness of its decorations and the exquisite accuracy achieved by its builders.  Some one has said that the Moguls designed like giants and finished like jewelers, and that epigram is emphasized in the Taj Mahal.  Any portion of it, any feature, if taken individually, would be enough to immortalize the architect, for every part is equally perfect, equally chaste, equally beautiful.

I shall not attempt to describe it.  You can find descriptions by great pens in many books.  Sir Edwin Arnold has done it up both in prose and poetry, and sprawled all over the dictionary without conveying the faintest idea of its glories and loveliness.  It cannot be described.  One might as well attempt to describe a Beethoven symphony, for, if architecture be frozen music, as some poet has said, the Taj Mahal is the supremest and sublimest composition that human genius has produced.  But, without using architectural terms, or gushing any more about it, I will give you a few plain facts.

[Illustration:  Interior of Taj Mahal]