h 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 bo