lands. On the other hand, however, instances are not wanting. It is related that one of the kings of Persia, a man of acknowledged talents, being out one Friday to attend service at the royal mosque, one of his attendants struck a poor Christian who ventured to approach the cavalcade, accompanying the blow with an awful imprecation: "Begone to hell, O cursed dog; this is not your church!" The injured youth with much presence of mind replied in a couplet from Hafiz:

I have been to the temple, the mosque, and the church,
And the same God I found worshiped in all.

The king smiled with admiration, and extended his hand to the young man, who went home richer by two hundred rupees. Hafiz especially is constantly resorted to by Mohammedans when seeking for an omen. Owing, no doubt, to the ambiguous nature of many of the couplets in his "Diwán," this book is regarded as the one of all others from which to draw an augury. The female members of the Mohammedan household make it the constant court of appeal in deciding the grave questions of every-day life. This practice is not confined to the zenanas; it is said that the king, Nadir Shah, chose a passage from the odes of Hafiz before undertaking a siege.

The oldest extant specimen of Persian poetry is the romance of Wamik and Asra, which appeared in the latter part of the sixth century, while as yet the worship of fire had not been superseded by the religion of Mohammed. The theme of the poem is:

Old as the rose, first into beauty blowing,

Old as the sun himself first into passion glowing.

Wamik and Asra, the Glowing and the Blowing, are personifications of the two great principles of heat and vegetation, the vivifying energy of heaven and the corresponding fertility of earth.

After the Moslem conquest of the country in 636, literature declined, and thus remained until the tenth century, when the language was restored, and there was hardly a prince or governor of a city who had not poets and literati in his train. One of the most distinguished of these patrons of letters was Mahmud of Ghazni, famous also as being the first Mohammedan ruler who successfully invaded India. To his court

repaired the peasant Ferdusi, to whom the sultan committed the execution of a long-cherished project-the composition of a poetical history of Persia from the foundation of the monarchy till the Moslem conquest. A mass of materials, consisting of oral traditions collected by a previous poet, was placed at his disposal, and his reward was to be a dinár for every distich. The task occupied thirty years; the work, entitled the "Shahnamah," included sixty thousand distichs, and secured for its author the title of "the Homer of Persia."

Of this production (which is still popular throughout India, where it is read in the original and in an Urdu translation) so eminent an authority as Sir W. Jones has declared that "the plan of the 'Shahnamah' was in some respects finer than that of the Iliad;" but, as has been pointed out by later writers, the two plans cannot be compared because they have nothing in common. The "Shahnamah" cannot properly be styled an epic. "There is not from beginning to end so much as an endeavor to delineate character. Rustum, the hero, is no more of a human being than the Iron Man in Spenser's "Faerie Queene." He is simply a machine in the form of a man, and possessed of almost unlimited force. At the age of five he kills with one blow of a club a mad white elephant. When he puts his hand on the backs of the strongest horses they sink down and roll upon the earth incapable of enduring the pressure." The author excels, it is true, like the Homer with whom he is compared, in his descriptions of battles.

On the completion of his work the poet was paid with sixty thousand pieces of silver instead of gold. Indignant at this evasion of the contract, Ferdusi distributed the money on the spot to the people about him, and vowed to avenge himself in a manner worthy of a poet. He left Ghazni, but before his departure he committed to the monarch's private secretary a carefully scaled packet, desiring him to present it the first time his master happened to be in a melancholy mood. The packet contained the following bitter satire:

What could one expect from the son of a slave,
But that, sooner or later, he'd turn out a knave?
Let his head with a crown be encircled about,
The meanness will somewhere be sure to peep out.
Plant in Eden's fair garden a bitter-fruit tree,
Let its waters of heavenly purity be;

Let rich dropping honey bedew the young root—
Still, still you will find that bitter's the fruit.
Bring the heavenly peacock, and cause it to brood
O'er the egg of a raven; and then let the food
Of the nestling be fig-seeds from Eden's fair tree,
And let Gabriel breathe on it-holy is he!
Let it drink of the water of sweet Salsebil-
What does it avail?-'tis a hoarse raven still!

Deposit a viper in that rosy bed;

With the choicest of luxuries let it be fed

Is it timed by your kindness, or softened its spite?
O no! it turns on you with venomous bite.

By night, bring an owl to your elegant bowers;

Let it perch on the rose-bushes, sport 'mid the flowers;
But as soon as the day spreads its wings on the sky,
So soon will the owl stretch its pinions to fly,
And seek the tall forests in darkness to lie.
So sure as our garments catch odorous smell
In a shop of rich perfumes-and so far 'tis well-
They will borrow as surely a dark dusty hue
If we stand by a forge-you allow this is true;
Then wonder no more if a dark, evil deed,
From a dark evil man spontaneous proceed.
No more can the Ethiop make himself white,
Than a soul of mean birth can emerge into light,
And show itself generous, noble, and wise-
So let not the poets throw dust in our eyes.
O king! if I sooner this lesson had learned,

I should not be mourning my hopes overturned.

From the tenth century to the fourteenth was the Golden Age of Persian literature, the Mohammedan princes maintaining a kind of literary rivalship in the patronage of letters, so that to excel in poetry was the surest way to fame and fortune. Of all the cities of Persia none gave birth to more distinguished poets than Shiraz, "the Athens of the East." This classic city was so fertile in luxuries of every kind as to give occasion to a popular saying that "if Mohammed had tested the pleasures of Shiraz he would have begged of Allah to make him immortal there." It was the birth-place of Sadi and Hafiz, two of the brightest stars that shine in this constellation.

Hafiz was born in 1300. He led a life of poverty, which he considered inseparable from genius, and which, according to his creed, was the only medium of salvation. Unlike most

poets of his age, he refused all invitations to courts. Gheias Ud Din, Emperor of India, sent him a pressing request to visit

him, but the poet politely declined. He replied in a poem which concluded as follows:

O Hafiz, why conceal the desire that possesses you of visiting Sultan Gheias Ud Din?

It is your business to complain of the distance that separates you

The poetry of Hafiz is entirely lyrical; his strains are noted for their music and eloquence. He was gifted with an imagination remarkable for its creative fancy. A recent writer praises him as follows: "Hafiz is a genuine poet—so far as we know, the sweetest of all Persian poets. There is in his poetry a freshness and a fragrance as of early spring flowers, a careless outpouring of joy as free from any after-taste of bitterness as the caroling of a bird among the leaves of summer." The same author says, and the words but too plainly indicate the saddest defect of Persian poetry, "All prob lems of life and thought he pushes to one side by a simple reference to fate, and dwells upon an earth where no cold moral reigns.' Roses, wine, and women, spring, summer, sunshine, these things are all pleasant surely; and 'who knoweth what thing cometh after death?' Such is the beginning, middle, and end of Hafiz's philosophy."

The following renderings of some of this poet's verses may be quoted:

Be patient, O my heart! be not vexed; verily the morn is succeeded by the night, and the night is succeeded by the day.

Some labor in the paths of love; others leave every thing to fate. But place no reliance on the permanency of the world; it is a tenement liable to many changes.

Be not sorry if a day of calamity should come; pass on, be thankful, lest greater ill betide thee.

His celebrated ode on the "Maid of Shiraz" is not worthy a place in the pages of the Quarterly. The following may suffice:

ODE BY HAFIZ.

Veiled is my soul in this material clay;

Blest be the hour that tears the veil away!

The imprisoned bird in sadness pours her strains,
So pines my soul to join her native plains.
Where am I come? or whence had I my birth?
Alas! I know not, nor aught else on earth.

Confined and bound in this material state
How shall I soar to purer realms of fate?
Yet will I hope the promised world of bliss;
And, with such hope, who would remain in this?
What if my heart reveal its longing woes?
The musk of Khotun must its sweets disclose.
The glittering tissue on my outward vest
But ill conceals the flame within my breast;
Come, then, transcendent source of life divine!
To thee the life thou gavest I resign;
Thou only livest; Hafiz is but thine!

It has been made a subject of discussion whether the poems of Hafiz should be taken in a literal or in a figurative sense. Strange as it may seem, the question is not capable of an easy solution. According to Jones, it "does not admit of a general answer. The most enthusiastic Sufis allow that there are some passages in the Odes of Hafiz which may be understood literally, and which are void of mystery as the words of God, while there are some entire odes which breathe the very essence of their philosophy, and to the general reader appear confused and obscure." #

* To give an account of Sufism-which has exercised so powerful an influence over the greatest minds of Persia and India-would require too lengthy a digression. Intimately connected as it is with the subject in hand we cannot pass it without a few words. It is an at`ractive and very popular species of Pantheism. The following passage from the "Bostán" of the poet Sadi helps to an understanding of it in its more moderate form:

"The love of a being composed, like thyself, of water and clay, destroys thy patience and peace of mind; it excites thee in thy waking hours with minute beauties, and engages thee in thy sleep with vain imaginations. With such real affection dost thou lay thy head at her feet, that the universe, in comparison with her, vanishes into nothing before thee; and since thy gold allures not her eye, gold and mere earth appear equal in thine. Not a breath dost thou utter to any one else, for with her thou hast no room for any other. Thou declarest that her abode is in thine eye; or, when thou closest it, in thy heart. Thou hast no fear of censure from any man; thou hast no power to be at rest for a moment; if she demands thy soul, it runs instantly to thy lips. Since an absurd love, with its basis on air, affects thee so violently, and commands thee with a sway so despotic, canst thou wonder that they who walk in the true path are drowned in the sea of mysterious adoration? They disregard life through affection for its giver; they abandon the world, through remembrance of its maker; they are inebriated with the melody of their amorous plaints; they remember their beloved, and resign to him both this life and the next. Through remembrance of God they shun all mankind; they are so enamored of the cup-bearer that they spill the wine from the cup. No panacea can heal them, for no mortal can be apprised of their malady; so loudly has rung in their ears, from eternity FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXV.-5