nger recalling
scenes of violence and murder; all was open, spacious, beautiful;
everything called up pleasing and romantic fancies; Lindaraxa once
more walked in her garden; the gay chivalry of Moslem Granada once
more glittered about the Court of Lions! Who can do justice to a
moonlight night in such a climate and such a place? The temperature
of a summer midnight in Andalusia is perfectly ethereal. We seem
lifted up into a purer atmosphere; we feel a serenity of soul, a
buoyancy of spirits, an elasticity of frame, which render mere
existence happiness. But when moonlight is added to all this, the
effect is like enchantment. Under its plastic sway the Alhambra
seems to regain its pristine glories. Every rent and chasm of time,
every mouldering tint and weather-stain, is gone; the marble resumes
its original whiteness; the long colonnades brighten in the
moonbeams; the halls are illuminated with a softened radiance,
we tread the enchanted palace of an Arabian tale.

"What a delight, at such a time, to ascend to the little airy
pavilion of the queen's toilet (el tocador de la reyna), which, like
a bird-cage, overhangs the valley of the Darro, and gaze from its
light arcades upon the moonlight prospect! To the right, the
swelling mountains of the Sierra Nevada, robbed of their ruggedness
and softened into a fairy land, with their snowy summits gleaming
like silver clouds against the deep blue sky. And then to lean over
the parapet of the Tocador and gaze down upon Granada and the
Albaycin spread out like a map below; all buried in deep repose; the
white palaces and convents sleeping in the moonshine, and beyond all
these the vapory vega fading away like a dreamland in the distance.

"Sometimes the faint click of castanets rises from the Alameda,
where some gay Andalusians are dancing away the summer night.
Sometimes the dubious tones of a guitar and the notes of an amorous
voice, tell perchance the whereabout of some moonstruck lover
serenading his lady's window.

"Such is a faint picture of the moonlight nights I have passed
loitering about the courts and halls and balconies of this most
suggestive pile; 'feeding my fancy with sugared suppositions,' and
enjoying that mixture of reverie and sensation which steals away
existence in a southern