"By breath of beds of roses drawn,áiyátofOmarKhayyámandSalámánandAbsá I found the grove in the morning pure, In the concert of the nightingales My drunken brain to cure.
"With unrelated glance I looked the rose in the eye: The rose in the hour of gloaming Flamed like a lamp hard-by.
"She was of her beauty proud. And prouder of her youth, The while unto her flaming heart The bulbul gave his truth.
"The sweet narcissus closed Its eye, with passion pressed; The tulips out of envy burned Moles in their scarlet breast,
"The lilies white prolonged Their sworded tongue to the smell; The clustering anemones Their pretty secrets tell."
"All day the rain Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain, The flood may pour from morn till night Nor wash the pretty Indians white."
This picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri, seems to belong to Hafiz:--
"O'er the garden water goes the wind alone To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave; The fire is quenched on the dear hearthstone, But it burns again on the tulips brave."
Friendship is a favourite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.
Hafiz says, "Thou learnest no secret until thou knoweth friendship; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters."
"Whilst I disdain the populace, I find no peer in higher place, Friend is a word of royal tone, Friend is a poem all alone.
"Wisdom is like the elephant, Lofty and rare inhabitant: He dwells in deserts or in courts; With hucksters he has no resorts."
"A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe, So much the kindlier shows him than before; Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw, He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor."
Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations, though it forms the staple of the "Divan." He has run through the whole gamut of passion,--from the sacred to the borders, and over the borders, of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him. From the plain text,--
"The chemist of love Will this perishing mould, Were it made out of mire, Transmute into gold."--
he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika's cheek, she was at a loss:--
