Illman & Sons
BEAUTY’S RETREAT.
Engraved expressly for Graham’s Magazine.
BEAUTY’S RETREAT.
A LEGEND OF GRANADA.
[WITH A STEEL ENGRAVING.]
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BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT.
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It was the evening of a sultry summer’s day, while the sun was yet hanging suspended, as it were, in a wreath of lustrous, gauzy vapor scarce a hand’s-breadth above the horizon. The skies were perfectly cloudless; and, but for that rich, golden haze which floated in the west about the sloping day-star, there was not a speck of mist to be seen over the whole expanse of the firmament, which, glowing, as it was, with the warm light of that soft southern region, resembled more a vault of exquisitely shadowed gems than the unfathomable depths of ether. All to the westward, the horizon was deluged with a flood of golden glory, too soft to be called intense, yet so vivid that the eye could scarcely brook it; melting as it streamed upward toward the zenith, by imperceptible degrees, into the radiance of the living sapphire; and thence deepening, through the azure tints of the Lapis Lazuli, into the darkest cærulean blue to the eastward, against which rose distinct, glittering with the last reflected sunbeams, the distant summits of the Cordoran mountains. Above these, soaring slowly upward, and momently gathering fresh brilliancy as the sun faded in the west, the full, round moon had already risen, with the evening-star at her side, a diamond spark beside an orient pearl.