The story of Shah Jahan, with all his easy bonhomie, his laxity of creed, his life of mingled fighting and debauchery, blended with his passionate and enduring love for the wife of his youth, and the sadness of his closing years, must always have an interest of its own. But in this creation of surpassing beauty I can find nothing that reflects the sadness of human fate, or that tells of the all-pervading solemnity of death. There is nothing of sad or mournful reminiscence, nothing of the infinite regret for love that is only a memory. It tells of no grief for the immutable decrees of fate; it is a defiance of death by associating it with all the bright and gossamer gleam of sunlight and of fairy beauty. It stands supremely alone, not by the power of any pathos, or of any appeal to the sympathy which the woes of humanity evoke, but as the brightest, the most joyous, the most luxuriant monument of death and decay that the world has ever seen.