Vivam amare, voluptas; defunctam, religio.
A multitude of nameless husbands and wives have experienced this truth in their bereavement; their love not decaying, but passing into resurrection. The Hindus have a fine parable of Kamadeva, the eastern Cupid. He shot Siva, who, turning on him in rage, reduced the mischievous archer to ashes. All the gods wept over his ashes. Then he arose in spiritual form, free from every physical trait or quality. Literature, both eastern and western, ancient and modern, gives us many instances of conjugal love outliving death, and, in holy tenderness of dedication, pleasing itself with all kinds of ideal restorations and celebrations of its object.
When Mausolus, king of Curia, died, his widow, Queen Artemisia, seemed thenceforth almost wholly absorbed in the memory of him. She built to him, at Halicarnassus, that magnificent monument, or mausoleum, which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world, and which became the generic name for all superb sepulchres. She employed the most renowned rhetors of the age to immortalize the glory of her husband, by writing and reciting his praises. At the consecration of the wondrous fabric which she had reared in his honor, she offered a prize for the most eloquent eulogy on Mausolus. All the orators of Greece were invited to the contest. Theopompus bore off the prize. It is said, that, during the two years by which she survived her royal spouse, she daily mixed some of his ashes with her drink, so that, ere their spirits met in Hades, her body was the tomb of his. Unquestionably there is something greatly overstrained in this; but the whole story is one of the most signal instances, handed down from the past, of an intense wedded affection triumphant over death, and crowning itself with death.
Still more costly honors than Artemisia lavished on her Mausolus, did the Great Mogul, Shah Jehan, grandson of Akhar and father of Aurungzebe, pay to his idolized wife, Moomtaza Mahul. She died, in 1631, in giving birth to a daughter. Shah Jehan's love for this exquisite being appears to have been supreme and irreplaceable. In her last moments, she made two requests: one, that he would build an imposing tomb for her; the other, that he would never marry again. He assented to both requests, and kept his word. His reign was the culminating period of the prosperity, power, and pomp of the empire. The gorgeousness of his state beggars description; but those terrible British, destined to overshadow and destroy it, were already beginning to get a foothold in India. Little, however, did the imperial mourner, Shah Jehan, heed them.
He at once set his architects at work, with twenty thousand laborers, to build over his lost Moomtaza a memorial worthy of her loveliness and of his grief. For twenty two years they toiled, when, at a cost equivalent to twenty million dollars now, unveiled from every disfiguring accompaniment, rose on the banks of the clear blue Jumna, at Agra, where it still stands to enchant the soul of every traveller who approaches, the Taj Mahul, the most exquisite building on the globe, an angelic dream of beauty, materialized, and translated to earth. It is a romance, at once of oriental royalty, of marriage, and of the human heart, that the unrivalled pearl of architecture in all the world should thus be a tomb reared over the body of his wife by the proudest monarch of the East.
Colonel Sleeman says, "Of no building on earth had I heard so much as of this; for over five and twenty years, I had been looking forward to the sight of it. And, from the first glimpse of the dome and minarets on the distant horizon, to the last glance back from my tent ropes to the magnificent gateway, I can truly say that every thing surpassed my expectations. After going repeatedly over every part, and examining the total view, from every position and in all possible lights, from that of full moon at midnight in a cloudless sky, to that of the noonday sun, the mind reposes in the calm persuasion, that there is an entire harmony of parts, a faultless congregation of architectural beauties, on which it could dwell for ever without fatigue; and one leaves it with a feeling of regret that he cannot have it all his life within his reach, and of assurance that the image of what he has seen can never be obliterated from his mind while memory holds her seat."
The quadrangle in which the structure stands is 964 feet one way, 329 the other. The area around is laid out in parterres, planted with flowers, blossoming shrubs, and cypresses, interlaced by rows of bubbling fountains, and avenues paved with freestone slabs. The mausoleum itself, the terrace, and the minarets, are all formed of the finest white marble, and thickly inlaid with precious stones. The funeral vault is a miracle of coolness, softness, splendor, tenderness, and solemnity. Fergusson, the historian of architecture, says, "No words can express the chastened beauty of that central chamber, the most graceful and the most impressive of all the sepulchres of the world." When, in that vault, before the two sarcophagi containing the bodies of Moomtaza and Shah Jehan, the priest reads the Koran in a sort of mournful chant, or an attendant plays with subdued breathings on a flute, the notes are borne up into the numerous arcades and domes, reduplicated, intermingled, dying away, fainter and fainter, sweeter and sweeter, until the ravished hearer, as he departs, can remember no more than that the sounds were heavenly, and produced a heavenly effect, making him feel, that, if to die were to listen for ever to those tones, death would be inconceivable bliss.
Russell, in his "Diary in India," thus records the impression the scene made on him: "Write a description of the Taj! As well write a description of that lovely dream which flushed the poet's cheek, or gently moved the painter's hand, as he lay trembling with delight, the Endymion of the glorious Art Goddess, who reveals herself and then floats softly away among the moonbeams and the dew clouds, as he springs up to grasp the melting form! Here is a dream in marble, the Taj: solid, permanent; but who, with pen or pencil, can convey to him who has not seen it the exquisite delight with which the structure imbues the mind at the first glance, the proportions and the beauty of this strange loveliness, which rises in the Indian waste, as some tall palm springs by the fountain in a barren wilderness? It is wrong to call it a dream in marble: it is a thought, an idea, a conception of tenderness, a sigh of eternal devotion and love, caught and imbued with earthly immortality. There it stands in its astonishing perfection, rising from a lofty platform of marble of dazzling whiteness, minarets, dome, portals, all shining like a fresh, crisp snow wreath. The proportions of the whole are so full of grace and feeling, that the mind rests quite contented with the general impression, ere it gives a thought to the details of the building, the exquisite screens of marble in the windows, the fretted porches, the arched doorways, from which a shower of fleecy marble, mingled with a rain of gems, seems about to fall on you; the solid walls melting and glowing with tendrils of bright flowers and wreaths of blood stone, agate, jasper, carnelian, amethyst, snatched, as it were, from the garden outside, and pressed into the snowy blocks. Enter by the doorway in front: the arched roof of the cupola soars above you, and the light falls dimly on the shrine like tombs in the centre of the glistening marble, see a winter palace, in whose glacial walls some gentle hand has buried the last flowers of autumn." In yon cenotaph, profusely covered with ornamental texts from the Koran, sleeps the lamented bride of the Indies. "Her lord lies beside her, in a less costly but loftier casket; and the two tombs are enclosed by a lattice of white marble, which is cut and carved as though it were of the softest substance in the world. A light burns in the tombs, and garlands of flowers are laid over the rich imitations of themselves. Hark as you whisper gently, there rolls through the obscure vault overhead a murmur like that of the sea on a pebbly beach in summer. A white bearded priest, who never raises his eyes from his book as we pass, suddenly reads out a verse from the Koran. Hark! How an invisible choir takes it up, till the reverberated echoes swell into a full volume of sound, as though some congregation of the skies were chanting their hymns above our heads. The eye fills and the lip quivers, we know not why: a sigh and a tear are the tribute which every heart that can be moved to pity, or has thrilled with love, must pay to the builder of the Taj."
Who that reads this tender romance of love and loss, pride and grief and peerless memorial, will not sometimes amidst enchanted recollections of Nala and Damayanti, Haroun Al Raschid and Zobeide, Shahriar and Scheherazade in his recurring thoughts allow a place for the imperfectly known but fascinating story of Shah Jehan and Moomtaza Mahul?