...
On a dark night, by the lustre of its rubies and pearls
it can lend stars to a hundred skies....
That was right enough, no doubt, but when our poet went on to say,
As long as a trace remains of existence and space
Shah Jahan shall continue to sit on this throne,
we feel that he was unwise. Such pronouncements can be tested. As it
happened, Shah Jahan was destined, very shortly after the poem was
written, to be removed into captivity by his son, and the rest of his
unhappy life was spent in a prison at Agra. On each end wall of the Hall
of Private Audience is the famous couplet,--
If there is a Paradise on the face of the earth,
It is this, Oh! it is this, Oh! it is this.
I think of the garden and palace of Delhi Fort as the loveliest spot in
India. Not the most beautiful, not the most impressive; but the
loveliest. The Taj Mahal has a greater beauty; the ruined city of
Fatehpur-Sikri has a greater dignity; but for the perfection of domestic
regality in design and material and workmanship, this marble home and
mosque and accompanying garden and terrace could not be excelled. After
the Halls of Audience we come to the seraglio and accompanying
buildings, where everything is perfect and nothing is on the grand
scale. The Pearl Mosque could hardly be smaller; and it is as pure and
fresh as a lotus. There is a series of apartments all in white marble
(with inlayings of gold and the most delicately pierced marble gratings)
through which a stream of water used to run (and it ran again at the
Coronation Durbar in 1911, when the Royal Baths were again made to
"function") that must be one of the most magical of the works of man.
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