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قراءة كتاب The Alhambra
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THE ALHAMBRA
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd
TORONTO
THE ALHAMBRA
BY · WASHINGTON · IRVING
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
ILLUSTRATED WITH DRAWINGS
OF THE PLACES MENTIONED
BY JOSEPH PENNELL
LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1911
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
First Edition (Cranford Series), 1896. Reprinted, 1906, 1911.
Pocket Classics, 1908.
INTRODUCTION
It is not possible to forget Washington Irving in the Alhambra. With a single volume, the simple, gentle, kindly American man of letters became no less a figure in the Moor's Red Palace than Boabdil and Lindaraxa of whom he wrote. And yet, never perhaps did a book make so unconscious a bid for popularity. Irving visited Granada in 1828. He returned the following year, when the Governor's apartments in the Alhambra were lent to him as lodgings. There he spent several weeks, his love for the place growing with every day and hour. It was this affection, and no more complex motive, that prompted him to describe its courts and gardens and to record its legends. The work was the amusement of his leisure moments, filling the interval between the completion of one serious, and now all but unknown, history and the beginning of the next.
Not many other men just then could write about Spain or anything Spanish so naturally. For, in 1829, while, within the walls of Alhamar and Yusef, he was listening to the prattle of Mateo and Dolores, in Paris, Alfred de Musset was writing his Contes d'Espagne, and Victor Hugo was publishing a new edition of his Orientales. A year later and the battle of Hernani was to be fought at the Comédie Française; a few more, and Théophile Gautier would be on his way across the Pyrenees. Time had passed since Châteaubriand, the pioneer of romance, could dismiss the Alhambra with a word. Hugo, in turning all eyes to the East, had declared that Spain also was Oriental, and to his disciples the journey, dreamed or made, through the land where Irving travelled in single-minded enjoyment, was an excuse for the profession of their literary faith. Irving, whatever his accomplishments, was unencumbered with a mission and innocent of pose. There is no reason to believe that he had ever heard