Hence the great
number of amatory poets that flourished in Granada. Hence those
amorous canticles breathing of love and war, and wreathing
chivalrous grace round the stern exercise of arms. Those ballads which
still form the pride and delight of Spanish literature are but the
echoes of amatory and chivalric lays which once delighted the Moslem
courts of Andalus, and in which a modern historian of Granada pretends
to find the origin of the rima Castellana and the type of the "gay
science" of the troubadours.
Poetry was cultivated in Granada by both sexes. "Had Allah," says
Ash-Shakandi, "bestowed no other boon on Granada than that of making
it the birth-place of so many poetesses; that alone would be
sufficient for its glory."
Among the most famous of these was Hafsah; renowned, says the old
chronicler, for beauty, talents, nobility, and wealth. We have a
mere relic of her poetry in some verses, addressed to her lover,
Ahmed, recalling an evening passed together in the garden of Maumal.
"Allah has given us a happy night, such as he never vouchsafes to
the wicked and the ignoble. We have beheld the cypresses of Maumal
gently bowing their heads before the mountain breeze- the sweet
perfumed breeze that smelt of gillyflowers: the dove murmured her love
among the trees; the sweet basil inclined its boughs to the limpid
brook."
The garden of Maumal was famous among the Moors for its rivulets,
its fountains, its flowers, and above all, its cypresses.
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