fail, trees whose leaf fades not, and flowers which at all seasons yield their fragrance and display their blossoms. Above it is winter; his stern presence tempering the voluptuous softness of the scene, and enhancing rather than impairing the beauty over which he hangs his snows. The sky rains upon the prospect a serene crystal light all the year through, unless at those rare times when the tempest gathers darkly on the summit of the Alpujarras, and the thunder's voice resounds along the plain. But it is the Alhambra we have come to visit.

It rises right above Granada. Drop a stone from the summit of any of its fronting towers, and it would come little short of falling upon the roofs of the city. A spur of mountain comes down from the Sierra Nevada; when it touches Granada, it bridles sharply up, and, erecting itself into a steep bluff crag, leans over the buildings of the town. On this crag is placed the Alhambra, a dream of the Orient in stone.

Let us ascend to it. We start from the great square of the Vivarambla, where, in the days of the magnificent Moor, gallant knights jousted in tournament; but now loiterers in brown cloaks, and poor market-women, have it all to themselves. We traverse the Zacatin, whose narrow pathway and bazaar-like shops remind one of Constantinople. We climb another narrow winding calle, and pass out at the city gate. We are in the domains of the Alhambra. We ascend a steep avenue shaded by elms, and can see, on our left, through the overarching boughs, the towers of the Alhambra on the crown of the steep; while, on the right, occupying the opposing summit, are the Torres Vermejos, or vermilion towers. These are much older than the Alhambra, seeing they can be traced far back in Arabian story, under the title of the "Red Towers." Some assign their erection to the Romans; others to the earlier Phoenicians.

We reach the top of the avenue; we turn sharply to the left, and we stand before a square Moorish tower or gateway. This is the "Gate of Justice;" for here, after the manner of the Orientals and the precedent of scriptural times, sat, sometimes the king, sometimes an inferior judge, to hear causes, pronounce sentence, and see the punishment inflicted. This was a dispatch which

The

mocks the slow delays of modern times. arch is in the horse-shoe form; on the key-stone on the outer side is graven a hand; on the inner side is graven a key. The hidden meaning of these symbols has much perplexed interpreters. There went abroad a tradition, that till the hand should reach down, and, passing under the arch, grasp the key, the Alhambra could not be taken. But as the result has not verified the prophecy, we scarce think that this was what the wise Moor meant. Others have seen in the sculptured hand a talisman to protect the building from evil, and to guard the treasures hidden under it. But we submit that its builder, Ibn-l-ahmar, in 1248, was much more likely to expend his treasures in paying his masons and carrying on his wars, than bury them idly in the earth, and so needed no talisman to guard what did not exist. Those probably are nearer the truththough, after all, the secret may not be worth the trouble of finding out-who see in these chisellings the symbols of the two chief attributes of a ruler,-power and knowledge: a hand strong to govern, and a wisdom able to judge.

We enter by the gate; we pass on through tortuous stone alleys: Spanish soldiers, portly priests, guides and tatterdemalions-hidalgoes, though in rags-paced up and down, or slept on stone benches. Threading this passage, we emerged on the esplanade on which stands the Alhambra, and which commands a glorious view of the Vega, with its bounding hills. We are impatient to enter and feast our eyes on the unique beauty within. But stay there is a preliminary which must be gone through. However little the stone key may be understood, all understand the silver one; and unless the hand of the visitor lay hold on this key, he will linger long on the threshold of the Alhambra.

We enter, and find ourselves in another clime. The East, with all its radiant beauty, has suddenly opened to us. The chisel toiling patiently from day to day could not have reared anything so airy, so graceful, so dazzling, so unlike any other structure we ever beheld. Enchantment alone, summoning up at will the dreams of the fancy, could have called into existence this glori ous pile. So one feels. To go over the whole edifice were impossible; it would fill a volume.

wall.

There is the "Hall of Justice," there is the

floor is paved with azulejos, interspersed with flower-beds. Around the four sides run Arabian arcades; the filigree work of which is delicate as gossamer, soft and lovely as hangings of lace. The arches are supported on rows of white marble pillars, some hundred and thirty in all; tall and palm-like, and so slender that one wonders to see them bear up the arches. A more fairy scene it is impossible to imagine. Here, as everywhere, in this wonderful pile, grace and loveliness is the prevailing characteristic-not grandeur which stimulates, but beauty which soothes the mind and woos it to voluptuous enjoyment.

Let us ascend the great tower of the Comares. It dominates the whole place, and looks down into the deep ravine of the Darro, affording, as we pass up, beautiful glimpses of the distant mountains, and of the rivers and gardens which it overhangs. We enter a vestibule. Though only an anti-chamber, we are charmed with its elegance, its alcoves, its slim pillars, and the lace-like tracery of its walls. A Moorish archway admits us into a lofty hall. It is called the "Saloon of the Ambassadors," from its having been, as is supposed, the audience-chamber of the Moorish kings. Traces of its former splendour remain in the rich arabesques of the walls, and especially in the lofty-vaulted ceiling of cedar-work on which the Arabian pencil has lavished all its marvellous powers. Ornaments of gold glitter on a ground of blue and red. Opposite the entrance is the spot where the throne stood. The

Mosque," there are the "Baths," there is the "Queen's dressing-room," and a dozen apartments besides, on which we cannot dwell. They are all alike in their exquisite beauty and fairy magnificence; and yet each differs from the other. The Egyptians affected the solemn in architecture; the Moors strove to excel in the light and graceful. And wonderful indeed is the art with which they wrought. Under its plastic power the marble shot up into pillars tall, graceful, and elegant as the palm-tree: the solid stone grew into a substance as delicate as the fabrics woven on the looms of Ghent, or knitted by the lace-workers of Mechlin. The fret-work of the walls and the tracery of the arcades was beautiful as the silver work of the Turin artificers. The tints of the azulejos or Moorish tiles were like light itself; and the paintings which adorned the chambers, though simple,—all representations of living forms being excluded, and only geometrical figures admitted,―had, from their ingenious combination, a most dazzling effect. And then the roof! It glowed like a heaven. It glittered and shot forth rays of light, as if formed of crystal, or gemmed with precious stones. A rare and marvellous art it truly was that could create all this. It stood alone in the world. It was born with the Moor, and it died with the Moor. It was sunny as the clime from which he came : graceful as the vegetable forms which nature presented to his eye: brilliant as the starry vault hung above his head, and fragile, apparently, as the tent in which his ancestors lived. And yet it was not so. Here has the Alhambra been standing all these six centuries. The rains and the winds of the mountains have beaten upon it, yet it has not fallen. Earthquake has rocked it, its tall slender pillars are still erect; armies have assailed it, yet its arches are not bowed nor its roof crushed. Barbarous occupants have lodged in it, and time has laid its hand upon it, yet its glories, though dimmed, are not extinguished. If such the Alhambra still is, in its age, what must it have been in its youth! How fresh and fair when newly from the hands of its builder !

The Alhambra is another instance of the power

lessness of art to civilize. Beauty, the most exquisite-even the beauty of the Alhambra-cannot expel passion or woo the soul to virtue. Under these glorious roofs what foul deeds have been plotted; and in these lovely chambers what atrocious crimes have been committed! How often has the blood of the innocent victim deluged this marble floor, and mingled with the crystal waters of that fountain! Men have lived here day by day, and from one year to another, in the midst of all these elegancies, so fitted, as some have thought, to prompt to what is gentle, and tender,

and loving, and yet the tiger within them has, all the while, been unsubdued. To tame man's soul and make it gentle-to purify man's heart and make it holy-it needs something more than the creations of the chisel and the glories of the pencil. And we were unspeakably delighted to read, in a recent communication from Spain, that a young minister, who lately visited the Alhambra, passed, on his way down from it, a little group of Spaniards, seated under the trees, in the calm evening air, busy reading the Bible.

HE Old Testament knows but one

sacred place the tabernacle, or temple, and its belongings. In these the localizing and relic-loving tendencies of human nature were both indulged and restrained. That they were to be indulged only in the transition state of the Church and in preparation for a higher, we learn from the reply of our Lord to the question of the Samaritan woman: "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father ;......but the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth for the Father seeketh such to worship him" (John iv. 21, 23). These words announce the advent of the religion of the Spirit and of the truth, that finds food for its piety in all places, objects, and times. To the New Testament, therefore, sacred places and objects are un'known. Name and thing are alike unknown.

In this it runs counter to the whole current of religious feeling in the Jewish, Greek, and Roman worlds. Up to New Testament times all religious feeling and sentiment gathered around favourite spots and objects. There were "holy grounds" and "holy things." There, prayer was wont to be made, and there the god was found propitious Apollo, at Delphos ; Diana, at Ephesus. Seldom was a spot chosen for the erection of an ancient temple until the god to whom it was to be dedicated indicated his local preference by some sign

from heaven. The system of Polytheism-if system it had--was to localize worship, and consecrate by turns every new or striking object or appearance of Nature. There were gods of the hills and gods of the valleys; and the great ocean not only had its Neptune, but each lake, river, and fountain its presiding deity. In this current, for ages, ran strongly and steadily the religious nature of man, making and multiplying to itself without end objects of worship.

This tendency the divine legislation of Moses did not attempt to root out, but only to restrain and regulate. At the appearance of the burning bush, Moses is told "to take his shoes from off his feet." Wandering in the Arabian desert, Israel could no more localize worship than sailors traversing the ocean. Yet God gave them sacred objects, which they carried about and set up as often as they encamped in a tabernacle, made after the pattern shown them in the mount. So soon as they entered Canaan they got also a sacred locality-Mount Zion-which "he desired for his habitation;" of which they could in after ages say, as the Jews still say, "Thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof" (Ps. cii. 4). "Why leap ye, ye high mountains? This is the mountain which God desires to dwell in.” When Christians now sing the Hundred and thirty-second Psalm, they no longer think of Zion as the one favoured spot of the earth, or its Temple as the only habitation God has chosen; but of the Church

in all the world, wherever two or three are met together in his name. A comparison of the Old and New Testament shows us that the religion of the Jew was only localized for a season, that in a future day it might be given to all lands. But to the ancient Jew the Hundred and thirtysecond Psalm expressed an intensely and exclusively local feeling. Some faint ideas he might have from the prophets of his religion one day lightening every land-yet in his thought it was only by bringing them all to worship at Jerusalem and gathering new glory around its Temple. The Jew never doubted that Jerusalem was the place where all nations should gather for the highest and most acceptable worship of Jehovah, the one God. "Whether in this mountain, or in Jerusalem?" was the question between the Jew and Samaritan, neither of them doubting that it was either the one or the other. To which our Lord gave an answer pleasing to neither, yet expressing the spirit of the gospel in opposition to all local or object worship.

The Old Testament does not seek to extinguish the tendency to gather the religious feelings around certain visible objects. It is only careful still to restrain and regulate this propensity. The most sacred thing in the Jewish tabernacle was the ark, the symbol of the divine presence, over which was the mercy-seat and the cherubim overshadowing it, where the Shekinah appeared. Within the ark was the pot of. manna, the rod of Aaron that budded, and the two tables of the law. The ark with its contents was so guarded from profanation that only the high priest could enter, and that after solemn sacrifices of purification, and in the attitude of deepest adoration. An Uzzah was smitten with death for his unhallowed curiosity, though in the act of sustaining it from falling. But though the ark and its contents were thus guarded, and they were objects of deepest national interest, it is remarkable that it is nowhere enjoined that they should be brought out yearly, or on any occasions whatsoever, to be shown, like the relics of a Roman Catholic saint, to the people. There they are laid up, as historical witnesses for God, his priesthood and laws; at hand when needed; often, we have no doubt, referred to, and the subject of conversation by the old, and of many questions by the young;-yet

never, that we read of, actually brought out to view to receive the homage or adoration of the people, or even to awaken anew their interest in their national history. Every seven years the Law was to be read publicly during the Feast of Tabernacles. What occasion so suitable for showing to the people these venerable relics of the past? The kings of Israel were to transcribe a copy of the Law with their own hands; yet we never read that they were admitted to a sight of these historical relics, or commanded to do them reverence. No mention is made of them at the time of the Babylonish Captivity, nor on their return and the rebuilding of the Temple. Mention is made of the golden vessels which Cyrus restored, amongst which, we naturally presume, was the ark with its contents; but of its contents, though more rare and difficult to be replaced if lost than any precious stones, no mention is made. Who that has read the life of Sir Walter Scott has not paused with interest over his narrative of the discovery, after one hundred years' oblivion, of the Scottish regalia in a neglected chest in the Castle of Edinburgh? As these relics of an ancient kingdom were being disclosed, a solemn awe came over all present. Scott's favourite daughter grew pale, and a sense of fainting came over her. "I discovered," says Scott, "that my daughter had become a woman.' But what were the associations of the most loyal and patriotic Scotchmen with their regalia, compared to that blended religious and national feeling with which a Jew must have regarded these relics? Yet not more perfect was the concealment of the body of Moses than the concealment of these relics from the people. Though laid up where all came to worship, not once, during the fourteen centuries of the national existence, do we read of them. What objects for a pious priest or Levite to have secreted during the Captivity, that he might reproduce them another day, and earn a nation's gratitude. A Rachel stole her father's images, and the Danites took away those of Micah; and nothing would appear so worthy of pious care to a Jew as he foresaw the desolation of the sacred things by an enemy, and nothing apparently so easy as to have secreted them. The regalia of Scotland were, for many years, secreted in the floor of a pulpit in Forfarshire, and the fidelity of

the parties is recorded to their honour in history but what comparison between them and the tables of the Law, written by the finger of God; the pot of manna; the rod, whose blossoming decided for ever the priestly family in Israel; and the mercy-seat, on which for ages the divine glory rested?

The father of the Jewish nation bought the field and cave of Machpelah whilst only a sojourner in Canaan, to bury his dead. There he buried Sarah. There Isaac was buried by Jacob and Esau. There Joseph buried his father Jacob, and thither were the bones of Joseph conveyed by the children of Israel when they left Egypt. A Jew was accustomed to speak of his country as "the land of his fathers' sepulchres ;" and, however flattered or obeyed whilst living, their kings are refused or admitted to the honours of the burial-place of the best kings, according as they have served God like David. Yet neither the burial-places of patriarchs, kings, or prophets were regarded by the Jews as holy ground. † Only one relic in the fourteen centuries of Jewish history grew up into an idol. In the days of Hezekiah, the brazen serpent had grown into an object of worship, to which the people offered incense. That monarch commenced his work of reformation by what some in our day would have called the deformation of this relic, dealing with it as Moses did with the golden calf, breaking it in pieces, and calling it in contempt Nehushtan, or "a bit of brass." Yet, among this people, whose reforming king breaks in pieces the idol relic, their sacred poetry is full of local associations and

* Stanley says, “Instead of acres of inscriptions, which cover the tombs of Egypt, not a single letter has been found in any ancient sepulchre of Palestine, and tradition is, in this class of monument, found to be unusually fallacious."-Stanley's "Palestine and Sinai," p. 148. No man knoweth his sepulchre, expresses the spirit of Judaism and Christianity. That every one may know, is the meaning of the Egyptian inscriptions. "Modern pilgrims," says the same writer, are troubled at the supposition of the holy sepulchre being unknown. The Israelites and early Christians would have been surprised if it had been preserved."

The Cave of Machpelah is now, we believe, covered by the mosque of El Khulil; the Sepulchre of David by a Moslem minaret.

No man

As to the tomb of Moses, we are expressly told, knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." "Yet," says Stanley, "it is curious that in spite of this mystery in which the grave of Moses is thus enveloped, a traditional sanctuary has arisen—a rude mosque is reverenced by the Mussulman world as covering the tomb of the prophet Moses." Stanley calls these obliterations, "providential obliterations of the holy places," and "providential safeguards against their elevation to a sanctity which might endanger the real holiness of the history and religion which they serve to commemorate."-Stanley's "Palestine and Sinai."

| celebrities. They are limited to a very few, yet these few are often the theme of song. The swallows and sparrows are envied their nearness to the sanctuary, and Zion Hill is the mountain of the Lord, the place he has chosen; and when Daniel, "the man greatly beloved," kneels in Babylon in prayer, it is with his face towards Jerusalem.*

If under the Old Testament this tendency was both permitted and restrained, indulged and regulated; under the New Testament even the Jewish minimum of this indulgence is withheld. Although the writers of the New Testament have just come out of the Old Testament church, imbued, as we would suppose, from childhood, with the love and veneration of Jewish places and things, they show no disposition to localize Christianity. The infancy of our Lord is connected with two localities - Bethlehem and Egypt. Bethlehem is only mentioned once in the Gospels, in fulfilment of prophecy. Egypt, where his parents sojourned with him five years, is also mentioned only once, and not a word as to the particular locality. To get more information we must go to the Apocryphal Gospels, where men have made answer to themselves; and there we learn that it was at Heliopolis in Egypt, † and the grotto at Bethlehem. How many spots must have been for ever fixed in their recollection by the presence of their Lord, where they first saw him, received their apostolic call, heard his Sermon on the Mount, or listened whilst he preached

*The only approach to something like a pilgrimage to s sacred spot is in Elijah's visit to Mount Horeb. But he was driven to that wild spot by the extraordinary circumstances of his time (1 Kings xix. 9-13).

If any spot should have been more hallowed than another to a Jew, it should have been the spot where the Law was given to his assembled nation from Sinai's top. "The Lord is among them as in Sinai, in the holy place" (Ps. Ixviii. 16, 17).

The national worship in the days of Hezekiah had become a religion of high places. Every height had its altar-Bethel, Dan, Gibeon, Mount Zion, Olivet (Gen. xii. 8; xxii 4; Judges xviii. 3; 1 Kings iii. 4; 2 Chron. i. 3; 2 Sam. vi. 17; xv. 32; 1 Kings xi. 7).

"A sycomore is shown," says Stanley, "at Heliopolis." "The infancy of Christ," says Stanley. embraces two localities: Bethlehem and Egypt. Of these the notices are so slight in the Gospel narratives as hardly to leave a trace in the subsequent history. Egypt is never again mentioned; Bethlehem only once, or at most twice, and then doubtfully and obscurely. But in the legends of the Apocryphal Gospels local circumstances of each event are there unfolded in the utmost detail, and the spots indicated, as the sycomore at Heliopolis, and the grotto at Bethlehem, are those still pointed out. The fact is worth notice as showing that the apocryphal rather than the canonical gospels are the real sources of the earliest local traditions; and that in this, pro bably, lies their chief historical importance."