“Adorned with manes of gold, and heavenly bright.” Indeed, the boldest heroes of all people rode to battle upon gallant chargers like those of Rhesus, which were “swift as the wind, and white as winter snow.”
The splendid picture of the Northern god would have lost its force without the presence of the fleet-footed Sleipnir, and Neptune were scarcely the king of ocean without his celestial steeds,
“Fed with ambrosial herbage from his hand, And their fetlocks linked with golden band.”
“Xanthus and Balius, of immortal breed, Sprung from the wind, and like the wind in speed. * * * * * * * * From their high manes they shake the dust, and bear The kindling chariot through the parted war.”
Būddha is represented, too, as deserting his wife and child, riding upon his coal-black steed, Kanthāka, which was said to be thirty feet in length, and able to clear the high gates of the palace, or the broad rivers that flowed across his pathway, at a single bound.
The Persian poem, like the colossal epics of India, is of such interminable length that the readers of modern times would not be willing to scan the many pages of endless description and hyperbole. We therefore give, in simple phrase, the best incidents of this heroic legend.
That there were historic materials of great antiquity, we have the testimony of Herodotus and Ctesius, and also of the book of Esther—“On that night the king could not sleep and he commanded to bring the books of records of the chronicles, and they were read before the king.”—Esther vi, 1. Also it is written. “And all the acts of his power and his might and the declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, are they not written in the books of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia?”—Esther x, 2.
The name of Firdusi is said to have been given him by the Governor of Tus, because his garden, which was called Ferdus (Paradise), was looked after by the father and brother of the poet, and it was in this delightful spot that he began the versification of the great national epic, the Shah Namah.
The sacred well at Mecca, the waters of which are claimed to have wondrous healing power.
In addition to the Shah Namah, Firdusi composed a poem of nine thousand couplets on the loves of Yusuf and Zulaikha, that abounds in elegant and spirited diction, but it is inferior to the greater epic, partly in consequence of his adoption of the same metre which he used in the Shah Namah, and which was well adapted to that martial poem, but not at all appropriate for the expression of the gentle strains of a love song.