But if I had previously
overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot
Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow.
I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the
Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read a
great deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in the
moonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knew
all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no
competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not my
Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly
lodged in my head, and I could not blast it out.
I wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of the
Taj, and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind. These
descriptions do really state the truth--as nearly as the limitations of
language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure
vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that
they will not inflate the facts--by help of the reader's imagination,
which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the
bulk of it at that.
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