Upon leaving the marble halls and lofty towers of the Alhambra, one discerns, on the side of a neighbouring mountain, the famous garden of the _Generalif_, which signifies, in the Moorish tongue, the _Home of Love_. In this garden was the palace to which the kings of Grenada repaired to pass the season of spring. It was built in a style similar to that of the Alhambra: the same gorgeous splendour, the same costly magnificence reigned there. The edifice is now destroyed; but the picturesque situation, the ever-varied and ever-charming landscape, the limpid fountains, the sparkling _jets d'eau_, and tumbling waterfalls of the _Generalif_, are still left to excite admiration. The terraces of this garden are in the form of an amphitheatre, and the lingering remains of their once beautiful Mosaic pavements are still to be seen. The walks are now darkly umbrageous, from the interwoven branches of gigantic cypresses and aged myrtles, beneath whose {147} grateful shades the kings and queens of Grenada have so often wandered. Then blooming groves and forests of fruit-trees were agreeably intermingled with graceful domes and marble pavilions: then the sweet perfume of the countless flowers that mingled their varied dyes in delightful confusion, floated in the soft air. Then the delicate tendrils of the vine clasped the supporting branches of the orange, and both together hung the mingled gold and purple of their clustering fruits over the bright waters that from marble founts "Gushed up to sun and air!" Then valour and beauty strayed side by side, beneath embowering branches, the fire of the one attempered to gentleness by the softer graces of the other, and the souls of both elevated and purified by nature's holy and resistless influences. But now the luxuriant vine lies prostrate, its climbing trunk and clinging tendrils rudely torn from their once firm support: even the voice of the fountain no longer warbles in the same gladsome tone as of yore; the mouldering fragments of the polished column and sculptured dome are now strewed on the earth; the sighing of the gentle breeze no longer awake: is the soft breath {148} of responding flowers; the loveliness and the glory of the _Home of Love_ are vanished away for ever; and the crumbling stones of the tesselated pavements echo naught but the lingering footfall of the solitary stranger, who wanders thither to enjoy those mournful charms of which the destroyer cannot divest a spot that must ever appeal so strongly to the vision and the heart, to the memory and the imagination. It is painful to quit the Alhambra and the Generalif, to return to the ravages, incursions, and sanguinary quarrels of the Moors and Christians.