posed his "Yusuf and Salikha," a poem as Mohammedan in spirit as the "Sháh Námeh" was Persian. In 1021,or 1025,he returned to Tus to die, and to be buried in his own garden-because his mind had not been orthodox enough that his body should rest in sacred ground. At the last moment-the story takes up again-Mahmud repented and sent the poet the covet-ed gold. The gold arrived at one gate while Firdusi's body was being carried by at another; and it was spent by his daughter in the building of a hospice near the city. For the sake of Mahmud let us try to believe the tale.

We know much about the genesis of this great epic, the "Shah Námeh"; far more than we know about the make-up of the other great epics in the world's literature. Firdusi worked from written materials; but he produced no mere labored mosaic. Into it all he has breathed a spirit of freshness and vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Zál and Rodhale, of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtásp and Kitayim. That he was also an excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the death of his only son; a curious intermingling of his personal woes with the history of his heroes. A cheerful vigor runs through it all. He praises the delights of wine-drinking, and does not despise the comforts which money can procure. In his descriptive parts, in his scenes of battle and encounters, he is not often led into the delirium of extravagance. Sober-minded and free of all fanaticism, he leans not too much to Zoroaster nor to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his Iránian heroes leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so these fifty or more thousand verses, written in the Arabic heroic Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of the Persians down to this very day when the glories of the land have almost altogether departed and Mahmud himself is all forgotten of his descendants.

Firdusi introduces us to the greatness of Mahmud of Ghazna's court. Omar Khayyám takes us into its ruins; for one of the friends of his boyhood days was Nizam al-Mulk, the grandson of that Toghrul the Turk, who with his Seljuks had supplanted the Persian power. Omar's other friend was Ibn Sabbah, the "old Man of the Mountain," the founder of the Assassims. The doings of both worked misery upon Chris

tian Europe, and entailed a tremendous loss of life during the Crusades. As a sweet revenge, that same Europe has taken the first of the trio to its bosom, and has made of Omar Khayyám a household friend. "My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses " is said to have been one of Omar's last wishes. He little thought that those very roses from the tomb in which he was laid to rest in 1123 would, in the nineteenth century, grace the spot where his greatest modern interpreter-Fitzgerald-lies buried in the little English town of Woodbridge!

The author of the famous Quatrains-Omar Ibn Ibrahim alKhayyam-not himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths of our own day-was of the city of Nishápúr. The invention of the Rubáiyát, or Epigram, is not to his credit. That honor belongs to Abu Said of Khorasan (968-1049), who used it as a means of expressing his mystic pantheism. But there is an Omar Khayyám club in London-not one bearing the name of Abu Said. What is the bond which binds the Rubáiyát-maker in far-off Persia to the literati of modern Anglo-Saxondom?

By his own people Omar was persecuted for his want of orthodoxy; and yet his grave to this day is held in much honor. By others he was looked upon as a Mystic. Reading the five hundred or so authentic quatrains one asks, Which is the real Omar? Is it he who sings of wine and of pleasure; who seems to preach a life of sensual enjoyment? or is it the stern preacher, who criticises all, high and low; priest, dervish, and Mystic-yea, even God himself? I venture to say that the real Omar is both; or, rather, he is something higher than is adequately expressed in these two words. The Ecclesiastes of Persia, he was weighed down by the great questions of life and death and morality, as was he whom people so wrongly call "the great sceptic of the Bible. The "Weltschmerz" was his, and he fought hard within himself to find that mean way which philosophers delight in pointing out. If at times Omar does preach carpe diem, if he paint in his exuberant fancy the delights of carousing, Fitzgerald is right-he bragged more than he drank. The under-current of a serious view of life runs through all he has written; the love of the beautiful in naturea sense of the real worth of certain things and the worthlessness of the Ego. Resignation to what is man's evident fate; doing

well what every day brings to be done-this is his own answer. It was Job's-it was that of Ecclesiastes.

66

This same Weltschmerz" is ours to-day; therefore Omar Khayyam is of us beloved. He speaks what often we do not dare to speak; one of his quatrains can be more easily quoted than some of those thoughts can be formulated. And then he is picturesque-picturesque because he is at times ambiguous. Omar seems to us to have been so many things-a believing Moslem, a pantheistic Mystic, an exact scientist (for he reformed the Persian calendar). Such many-sidedness was possible in Islam; but it gives him the advantage of appealing to many and different classes of men; each class will find that he speaks their mind and their mind only. That Omar was also tainted by Sufism there can be no doubt; and many of his most daring flights must be regarded as the results of the greater license which Mystic interpretation gave to its votaries.

By the side of Firdusi the epic poet, and Omar the philosopher, Sa'di the wise man, well deserves a place. His countrymen are accustomed to speak of him simply as "the Sheikh," much more to his real liking than the titles "The nightingale of the groves of Shiraz," or "The nightingale of a Thousand Songs," in which Oriental hyperbole expresses its appreciation. Few leaders and teachers have had the good fortune to live out their teachings in their own lives as had Sa'di. And that life was long indeed. Muharrif al-Din Abdallah Sa'di was born at Shiraz in 1184, and far exceeded the natural span of life allotted to man-for he lived to be one hundred and ten years of age and much of the time was lived in days of stress and trouble. The Mongols were devastating in the East; the Crusaders were fighting in the West. In 1226 Sa'di himself felt the effects of the one-he was forced to leave Shiraz and grasp the wanderer's staff, and by the Crusaders he was taken captive and led away to Tripoli. But just this look into the wide world, this thorough experience of men and things, produced that serenity of being that gave him the firm hold upon life which the true teacher must always have. Of his own spiritual condition and contentment he says: Never did I complain of my forlorn condition but on one occasion, when my feet were bare, and I had not wherewithal to shoe them. Soon after, meeting a man without feet, I was thankful for the bounty of Providence to myself, and with perfect resignation submitted to my want of shoes."

Thus attuned to the world, Sa'di escapes the depths of misanthropy as well as the transports of unbridled license and somewhat blustering swagger into which Omar at times fell. In his simplicity of heart he says very tenderly of his own. work:

"We give advice in its proper place,

Spending a lifetime in the task.

If it should not touch any one's ear of desire,
The messenger told his tale; it is enough."

That tale is a long one. His apprenticeship was spent in Arabic Bagdad, sitting at the feet of noted scholars, and taking in knowledge not only of his own Persian Sufism, but also of the science and learning which had been gathered in the home of the Abbaside Caliphs. His journeyman-years took him all through the dominions which were under Arab influence-in Europe, the Barbary States, Egypt, Abyssinia, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, India. All these places were visited before he returned to Shiraz, the "seat of learning," to put to writing the thoughts which his sympathetic and observing mind had been evolving during all these years. This time of his mastership was spent in the seclusion almost of a recluse and in producing the twenty-two works which have come down to us. An Oriental writer says of these periods of his life: "The first thirty years of Sa'di's long life were devoted to study and laying up a stock of knowledge; the next thirty, or perhaps forty, in treasuring up experience and disseminating that knowlege during his wide extending travels; and that some portion should intervene between the business of life and the hour of death (and that with him chanced to be the largest share of it), he spent the remainder of his life, or seventy years, in the retirement of a recluse, when he was exemplary in his temperance and edifying in his piety."

Of Sa'di's versatility, these twenty-two works give sufficient evidence. He could write homilies (Risalahs) in a Mysticreligious fashion. He could compose lyrics in Arabic and Turkish as well as in Persian. He was even led to give forth erotic verses. Fondly we hope that he did this last at the command of some patron or ruler! But Sa'di is known to us chiefly by his didactic works, and for these we cherish him. The Bustan," or Tree-Garden," is the more sober and

theoretical, treating of the various problems and questions of ethics, and filled with Mystic and Sufic descriptions of love.

His other didactic work, the "Gulistan," is indeed a "Garden of Roses," as its name implies; a mirror for every one alike, no matter what his station in life may be. In prose and in poetry, alternating; in the form of rare adventures and quaint devices; in accounts of the lives of kings who have passed away; in maxims and apothegms, Sa'di inculcates his worldly wisdom-worldly in the better sense of the word. Like Goethe in our own day, he stood above the world and yet in it; so that while we feel bound to him by the bonds of a common human frailty, he reaches out with us to a higher and purer atmosphere. Though his style is often wonderfully ornate, it is still more sober than that of Háfiz. Sa'di is known to all readers of Persian in the East; his "Gulistan " is often a favorite reading-book.

The heroic and the didactic are, however, not the only forms in which the genius of Persian poetry loved to clothe itself. From the earliest times there were poets who sung of love and of wine, of youth and of nature, with no thought of drawing a moral, or illustrating a tale. From the times of Rudagi and the Samanide princes (tenth century), these poets of sentiment sang their songs and charmed the ears of their hearers. Even Firdusi showed, in some of his minor poems, that joyous look into and upon the world which is the soul of all lyric poetry. But of all the Persian lyric poets, Shams al-Din Mohammed Háfiz has been declared by all to be the greatest. Though the storms of war and the noise of strife beat all about his country and even disturbed the peace of his native place -no trace of all this can be found in the poems of Háfiz-as though he were entirely removed from all that went on about him, though seeing just the actual things of life. He was, to all appearance, unconcerned: glad only to live and to sing. At Shiraz he was born; at Shiraz he died. Only once, it is recorded, did he leave his native place, to visit the brother of his patron in Yezd. He was soon back again: travel had no inducement for him. The great world outside could offer him nothing more than his wonted haunts in Shiraz. It is further said that he put on the garb of a Dervish; but he was altogether free of the Dervish's conceit. "The ascetic is the serpent of his age" is a saying put into his mouth.