PERSIAN POETRY.

To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna during the last year, we owe our best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German, besides the "Divan" of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets, who wrote during a period of five and a half centuries, from A.D. 1000 to 1550. The seven masters of the Persian Parnassus, Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami, have ceased to be empty names; and others, like Ferideddin Attar, and Omar Chiam, promise to rise in Western estimation. That for which mainly books exist is communicated in these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good telescope,—as the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth,—but the one eminent value is the space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock, by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions, which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few and simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on fruits and game,—the poor, on a watermelon's peel. All or nothing is the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it, and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. "My father's empire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, "is so large, that people perish with cold, at one extremity, whilst they are suffocated with heat, at the other." The temperament of the people agrees with this life in extremes. Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches an inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man's history: his birthday, called the Day of the Lot, and the Day of Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are his virtues.

The favor of the climate, making subsistence easy, and encouraging an outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual organization,—leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the Hindoos, (more Oriental in every sense,) whom no people have surpassed in the grandeur of their ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs, with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which the improvvisatori produced on the children of the desert. "When the bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief's excitement was almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild tribes of the Persian mountains. Such verses, chanted by their self-taught poets, or by the girls of their encampment, will drive warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward, on their return from the dangers of the ghazon, or the fight. The excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, without the evil effect of either."

The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose few legends are connected with the Jewish history, and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch. The principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry is Solomon. Solomon had three talismans: first, the signet ring, by which he commanded the spirits, on the stone of which was engraven the name of God; second, the glass, in which he saw the secrets of his enemies, and the causes of all things, figured; the third, the east wind, which was his horse. His counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise fowl, who had lived ever since the beginning of the world, and now lives alone on the highest summit of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none now living has seen him. By him Solomon was taught the language of birds, so that he heard secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk, of a length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon,—men placing themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on his left. When all were in order, the east wind, at his command, took up the carpet, and transported it, with all that were upon it, whither he pleased,—the army of birds at the same time flying overhead, and forming a canopy to shade them from the sun. It is related, that, when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a palace, of which the floor or pavement was of glass, laid over running water, in which fish were swimming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, and raised her robes, thinking she was to pass through the water. On the occasion of Solomon's marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents, appeared before his throne. Behind them all came the ant with a blade of grass: Solomon did not despise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier, at a certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one of the Dews, or evil spirits, found, and, governing in the name of Solomon, deceived the people.

Firdousi, the Persian Homer, has written in the Shah Nameh the annals of the fabulous and heroic kings of the country: of Karun, (the Persian Croesus.) the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with all his treasures, lies buried not far from the Pyramids, in the sea which bears his name; of Jamschid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted seven hundred years; of Kai Kaus, whose palace was built by demons on Alberz, in which gold and silver and precious stones were used so lavishly, and such was the brilliancy produced by their combined effect, that night and day appeared the same; of Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at the arrogance of the King of Mazinderan, that every hair on his body started up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked the sinews of an enemy.

These legends,—with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of life,—the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschun, of Chosru and Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose,—pearl-diving, and the virtues of gems,—the cohol, a cosmetic by which pearls and eyebrows are indelibly stained black,—the bladder in which musk is brought,—the down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the eyelash,—lilies, roses, tulips, and jasmines,—make the staple imagery of Persian odes.

The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life, conveyed in a lively image, especially in an image addressed to the eye, and contained in a single stanza, were always current in the East; and if the poem is long, it is only a string of unconnected verses. They use an inconsecutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and the connection between the stanzas of their longer odes is much like that between the refrain of our old English ballads,

"The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,"

or

"The rain it raineth every day,"

and the main story.

Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the following:—

"The secret that should not be blown Not one of thy nation must know; You may padlock the gate of a town, But never the mouth of a foe."

Or this of Omar Chiam:—

"On earth's wide thoroughfares below Two only men contented go: Who knows what's right and what's forbid, And he from whom is knowledge hid."

Or this of Enweri:—

"On prince or bride no diamond stone Half so gracious ever shone, As the light of enterprise Beaming from a young man's eyes."

Or this of Ibn Jemin:—

"Two things thou shalt not long for, if thou love a life serene: A woman for thy wife, though she were a crowned queen; And, the second, borrowed money, though the smiling lender say That he will not demand the debt until the Judgment Day."

Or this poem on Friendship:—

"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere."

Here is a poem on a Melon, by Adsched of Meru:—

"Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk,— Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare,— If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair,— If you leave it whole, the full harvest-moon is there."

Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accosts all topics with an easy audacity. "He only," he says, "is fit for company, who knows how to prize earthly happiness at the value of a night-cap. Our father Adam sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not, if I hold it dear at one grapestone." He says to the Shah, "Thou who rulest after words and thoughts which no ear has heard and no mind has thought, abide firm until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from the old graybeard of the sky." He says,—

"I batter the wheel of heaven When it rolls not rightly by; I am not one of the snivellers Who fall thereon and die."

The rapidity of his turns is always surprising us:—

"See how the roses burn! Bring wine to quench the fire! Alas! the flames come up with us,— We perish with desire."

After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences which might be engraved on a sword-blade and almost on a ring.

"In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful."

"Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts."

"On every side is an ambush laid by the robber-troops of circumstance; hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong speed."

"The earth is a host who murders his guests."

"Good is what goes on the road of Nature. On the straight way the traveller never misses."

"Alas! till now I had not known My guide and Fortune's guide are one."

"The understanding's copper coin Counts not with the gold of love."

"'Tis writ on Paradise's gate, 'Wo to the dupe that yields to Fate!'"

"The world is a bride superbly dressed;— Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul."

"Loose the knots of the heart; never think on thy fate: No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl."

"There resides in the grieving A poison to kill; Beware to go near them 'Tis pestilent still."

Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords,—and this is foreseen:—

"I will be drunk and down with wine; Treasures we find in a ruined house."

Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that covers it:—

"To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs, Bring bands of wine for the stupid head."

"The Builder of heaven Hath sundered the earth, So that no footway Leads out of it forth.

"On turnpikes of wonder Wine leads the mind forth, Straight, sidewise, and upward, West, southward, and north.

"Stands the vault adamantine Until the Doomsday; The wine-cup shall ferry Thee o'er it away."

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an object of interest, and his every phrase and syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.

His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river, that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with great arteries,—this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and gratification. The difference is not so much in the quality of men's thoughts as in the power of uttering them. What is pent and smouldered in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new form, at once relief and creation.

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles,—that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.

Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows.

"Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine."

He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover, has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz, for the name's sake. A law or statute is to him what a fence is to a nimble schoolboy,—a temptation for a jump. "We would do nothing but good; else would shame come to us on the day when the soul must hie hence;—and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris themselves would forsake that, and come out to us."

His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader. There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion. He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cup-bearer. This boundless charter is the right of genius. "No evil fate," said Beethoven, "can befall my music, and he to whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness which the others drag about with them."

We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world. Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:—"Bring wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's independence, what is sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?"—and sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:—

"I am: what I am My dust will be again."

A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule holds,—[Greek: sunetois phonei], it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot's, or, as at other times, with an eagle's quill.

Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general, what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to grandees? Yet in the "Divan" you would not skip them, since his muse seldom supports him better.

"What lovelier forms things wear, Now that the Shah comes back!"

And again:—

"Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down. Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear."

And again:—

"Mirza! where thy shadow falls, Beauty sits and Music calls; Where thy form and favor come, All good creatures have their home."

Here are a couple of stately compliments to his Shah, from the kindred genius of Enweri:—

"Not in their houses stand the stars, But o'er the pinnacles of thine!"

"From thy worth and weight the stars gravitate, And the equipoise of heaven is thy house's equipoise!"

It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a handsome youth,—

"Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Schiraz! I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!"—

the verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, "Alas, my lord, if I had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!"

The Persians had a mode of establishing copyright the most secure of any contrivance with which we are acquainted. The law of the ghaselle, or shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza. Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece. It is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy. We remember but two or three examples in English poetry: that of Chaucer, in the "House of Fame"; Jonson's epitaph on his son,—

"Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry";

and Cowley's,—

"The melancholy Cowley lay."

But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, "The angels in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." He says, "The fishes shed their pearls, out of desire and longing, as soon as the ship of Hafiz swims the deep."

"Out of the East, and out of the West, no man understands me; Oh, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind! This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded, 'Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!'"

Again,—

"I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it said in the early morning, 'I am the disciple of the sweet-voiced Hafiz!'"

And again,—

"When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance."

"No one has unveiled thoughts like Hafiz, since the locks of the Word-bride were first curled."

"Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not himself by nature noble."

But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes the metrical form which they seem to require:—

"Fit for the Pleiads' azure chord The songs I sung, the pearls I bored."

Another:—

"I have no hoarded treasure, Yet have I rich content; The first from Allah to the Shah, The last to Hafiz went."

Another:—

"High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine Fine gold and silver ore; More worth to thee the gift of song, And the clear insight more."

Again:—

"Thou foolish Hafiz! say, do churls Know the worth of Oman's pearls? Give the gem which dims the moon To the noblest, or to none."

Again:—

"O Hafiz! speak not of thy need; Are not these verses thine? Then all the poets are agreed, No man can less repine."

He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the vizier returning from Mecca he says,—

"Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy fortune, Thou hast indeed seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the temple. Nor has any man inhaled from the musk-bladder of the merchant, or from the musky morning-wind, that sweet air which I am permitted to breathe every hour of the day."

And with still more vigor in the following lines:—

"Oft have I said, I say it once more, I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself. I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me; What the Eternal says, I stammering say again. Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses, And according to my food I grow and I give. Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl, And am only seeking one to receive it."

And his claim has been admitted from the first. The muleteers and camel-drivers, on their way through the desert, sing snatches of his songs, not so much for the thought, as for their joyful temper and tone; and the cultivated Persians know his poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not appear to have set any great value on his songs, since his scholars collected them for the first time after his death.

In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phoenix alighting on the Tree of Life:—

"My phoenix long ago secured His nest in the sky-vault's cope; In the body's cage immured, He is weary of life's hope.

"Round and round this heap of ashes Now flies the bird amain, But in that odorous niche of heaven Nestles the bird again.

"Once flies he upward, he will perch On Tuba's golden bough; His home is on that fruited arch Which cools the blest below.

"If over this world of ours His wings my phoenix spread, How gracious falls on land and sea The soul refreshing shade!

"Either world inhabits he, Sees oft below him planets roll; His body is all of air compact, Of Allah's love his soul."

Here is an ode which is said to be a favorite with all educated Persians:—

"Come!—the palace of heaven rests on aëry pillars,— Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind. I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces. Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy? O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch; This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest. Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven; I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net. I, too, have a counsel for thee; oh, mark it and keep it, Since I received the same from the Master above: Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls; A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride. This jest [of the world], which tickles me, leave to my vagabond self. Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks; Neither to me nor to thee was option imparted; Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose. The loving nightingale mourns;—cause enow for mourning;— Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz? Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech."

Here is a little epitaph that might have come from Simonides:—

"Bethink, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest Mad Destiny this tender stripling played: For a warm breast of ivory to his breast, She laid a slab of marble on his head."

The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive, and fig-tree, and the birds that inhabit them, and the garden flowers, are never wanting in these musky verses, and are always named with effect. "The willows," he says, "bow themselves to every wind, out of shame for their unfruitfulness." We may open anywhere on a floral catalogue.

"By breath of beds of roses drawn, 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."

Presently we have,—

——"All day the rain Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain, The flood may pour from morn till night Nor wash the pretty Indians white."

And so onward, through many a page.

The following verse of Omar Chiam seems to belong to Hafiz:—

"Each spot where tulips prank their state Has drunk the life-blood of the great; The violets yon fields which stain Are moles of beauties Time hath slain."

As might this picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri:—

"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 hearth-stone, But it burns again on the tulips brave."

Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.

Hafiz says,—

"Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters."

Ibn Jemin writes thus:—

"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."

Dschami says,—

"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,"—

or, from another favorite legend of his chemistry,—

"They say, through patience, chalk Becomes a ruby stone; Ah, yes, but by the true heart's blood The chalk is crimson grown,"—

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:—

"And since round lines are drawn My darling's lips about, The very Moon looks puzzled on, And hesitates in doubt If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth Be not her true way to the South."

His ingenuity never sleeps:—

"Ah, could I hide me in my song, To kiss thy lips from which it flows!"—

and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:—

"Fair fall thy soft heart! A good work wilt thou do? Oh, pray for the dead Whom thine eyelashes slew!"

And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode in!—

"They strew in the path of kings and czars Jewels and gems of price; But for thy head I will pluck down stars, And pave thy way with eyes.

"I have sought for thee a costlier dome Than Mahmoud's palace high, And thou, returning, find thy home In the apple of Love's eye."

Nor shall Death snatch her from his pursuit:—

"If my darling should depart And search the skies for prouder friends, God forbid my angry heart In other love should seek amends!

"When the blue horizon's hoop Me a little pinches here, On the instant I will die And go find thee in the sphere."

Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:—

"I know this perilous love-lane No whither the traveller leads, Yet my fancy the sweet scent of Thy tangled tresses feeds.

"In the midnight of thy locks, I renounce the day; In the ring of thy rose-lips, My heart forgets to pray."

And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:—

"Plunge in yon angry waves, Renouncing doubt and care; The flowing of the seven broad seas Shall never wet thy hair.

"Is Allah's face on thee Bending with love benign, And thou not less on Allah's eye O fairest! turnest thine."

We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.

CHODSCHU KERMANI.

THE EXILE.

"In Farsistan the violet spreads Its leaves to the rival sky,— I ask, How far is the Tigris flood, And the vine that grows thereby?

"Except the amber morning wind, Not one saluted me here; There is no man in all Bagdad To offer the exile cheer.

"I know that thou, O morning wind, O'er Kerman's meadow blowest, And thou, heart-warming nightingale, My father's orchard knowest.

"Oh, why did partial Fortune From that bright land banish me? So long as I wait in Bagdad, The Tigris is all I see.

"The merchant hath stuffs of price, And gems from the sea-washed strand, And princes offer me grace To stay in the Syrian land:

"But what is gold for but for gifts? And dark without love is the day; And all that I see in Bagdad Is the Tigris to float me away."

NISAMI.

"While roses bloomed along the plain, The nightingale to the falcon said, 'Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb? With closed mouth thou utterest, Though dying, no last word to man. Yet sitt'st thou on the hand of princes, And feedest on the grouse's breast, Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels Squander in a single tone, Lo! I feed myself with worms, And my dwelling is the thorn.'— The falcon answered, 'Be all ear: I, experienced in affairs, See fifty things, say never one; But thee the people prizes not, Who, doing nothing, say'st a thousand. To me, appointed to the chase, The king's hand gives the grouse's breast; Whilst a chatterer like thee Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!'"

The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.

ENWERI.

BODY AND SOUL.

"A painter in China once painted a hall;— Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall;— One half from his brush with rich colors did run, The other he touched with a beam of the sun; So that all which delighted the eye in one side, The same, point for point, in the other replied.

"In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found; Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground: Is one half depicted with colors less bright? Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!"

IBN JEMIN.

"I read on the porch of a palace bold In a purple tablet letters cast,— 'A house, though a million winters old, A house of earth comes down at last; Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All, And build the dome that shall not fall.'"

"What need," cries the mystic Feisi, "of palaces and tapestry? What need even of a bed?

"The eternal Watcher, who doth wake All night in the body's earthen chest, Will of thine arms a pillow make, And a holster of thy breast."

A stanza of Hilali on a Flute is a luxury of idealism:—

"Hear what, now loud, now low, the pining flute complains, Without tongue, yellow-cheeked, full of winds that wail and sigh, Saying, 'Sweetheart, the old mystery remains, If I am I, thou thou, or thou art I.'"

Ferideddin Attar wrote the "Bird Conversations," a mystical tale, in which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg.

"The bird-soul was ashamed; Their body was quite annihilated; They had cleaned themselves from the dust, And were by the light ensouled. What was, and was not,—the Past,— Was wiped out from their breast. The sun from near-by beamed Clearest light into their soul; The resplendence of the Simorg beamed As one back from all three. They knew not, amazed, if they Were either this or that. They saw themselves all as Simorg, Themselves in the eternal Simorg. When to the Simorg up they looked, They beheld him among themselves; And when they looked on each other, They saw themselves in the Simorg. A single look grouped the two parties. The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished, This in that, and that in this, As the world has never heard. So remained they, sunk in wonder, Thoughtless in deepest thinking, And quite unconscious of themselves. Speechless prayed they to the Highest To open this secret, And to unlock Thou and We. There came an answer without tongue.— 'The Highest is a sun-mirror; Who comes to Him sees himself therein, Sees body and soul, and soul and body: When you came to the Simorg, Three therein appeared to you, And, had fifty of you come, So had you seen yourselves as many. Him has none of us yet seen. Ants see not the Pleiades. Can the gnat grasp with his teeth The body of the elephant? What you see is He not; What you hear is He not. The valleys which you traverse, The actions which you perform, They lie under our treatment And among our properties. You as three birds are amazed, Impatient, heartless, confused: Far over you am I raised, Since I am in act Simorg. Ye blot out my highest being, That ye may find yourselves on my throne; Forever ye blot out yourselves, As shadows in the sun. Farewell!'"

Among the religious customs of the dervises, it seems, is an astronomical dance, in which the dervis imitates the movements of the heavenly bodies by spinning on his own axis, whilst, at the same time, he revolves round the sheikh in the centre, representing the sun; and as he spins, he sings the song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan:—

"Spin the ball! I reel, I hum, Nor head from foot can I discern, Nor my heart from love of mine, Nor the wine-cup from the wine. All my doing, all my leaving, Reaches not to my perceiving. Lost in whirling spheres I rove, And know only that I love.

"I am seeker of the stone, Living gem of Solomon; From the shore of souls arrived, In the sea of sense I dived; But what is land, or what is wave, To me who only jewel crave? Love's the air-fed fire intense, My heart is the frankincense; As the rich aloes flames, I glow, Yet the censer cannot know. I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing; Stand not, pause not, in my going.

"Ask not me, as Muftis can To recite the Alcoran; Well I love the meaning sweet,— I tread the book beneath my feet.

"Lo! the God's love blazes higher, Till all difference expire. What are Moslems? what are Giaours? All are Love's, and all are ours. I embrace the true believers, But I reck not of deceivers. Firm to heaven my bosom clings, Heedless of inferior things; Down on earth there, underfoot, What men chatter know I not."

* * * * *

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

——I think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—you must intend that for one of the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of the other day.

I thank you, my young friend,—was my reply,—but I must say something better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the number.

——The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there were on record, and what, and by whom said.

——Why, let us see,—there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, "the great Bostonian," after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he said a great many wise things,—and I don't feel sure he didn't borrow this,—he speaks as if it were old. But then he applied it so neatly!—

"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged."

Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the Historian, in one of his flashing moments:—

"Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries."

To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men:—

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."

——The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.

The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn't think the wit meant any irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly place after New York or Boston.

A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they call John,—evidently a stranger,—said there was one more wise man's saying that he had heard; it was about our place, but he didn't know who said it.—A civil curiosity was manifested by the company to hear the fourth wise saying. I heard him distinctly whispering to the young fellow who brought him to dinner, Shall I tell it? To which the answer was, Go ahead!—Well,—he said,—this was what I heard:—

"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar."

Sir,—said I,—I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with malignant dulness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of Boston,—and of all other considerable—and inconsiderable—places with which I have had the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think London is the only place in the world. Frenchmen—you remember the line about Paris, the Court, the World, etc.—I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that city which ran thus: "Hotel de l'Univers et des États Unis"; and as Paris is the universe to a Frenchman, of course the United States are outside of it.—"See Naples and then die."—It is quite as bad with smaller places. I have been about, lecturing, you know, and have found the following propositions to hold true of all of them.

1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it is affectionately styled by the inhabitants the "good old town of"—— (whatever its name may happen to be).

3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a "remarkably intelligent audience."

4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.

5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world. (One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short pieces to the "Paetolian" some time since, which were "respectfully declined.")

Boston is just like other places of its size;—only, perhaps, considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their talent and wealth. I have observed, by the way, that the people who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual basin, or suction-range, of one large one, of the pretensions of any other. Don't you see why? Because their promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big city,—their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market; all their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.

——Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?—Oh,—an example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn't you like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.

Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks,)—if they have, scattered about, those mighty-square houses built something more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its monument,—if they have gardens with elbowed apple trees that push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the side-walk,—if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,—I think I could go to pieces, after my life's work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the stars by night.

——Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great towns?—I don't believe there is much difference. You know how they read Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts?—Well, they read it

"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"

——Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,—with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and this into the interior apartments. The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers.

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none is given with it!

If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,—The Lord have mercy on your soul! You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,—or, if you are a man, run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Francisco,—or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play some real life-tragedy or other.

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door. The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones,—touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses. A few exercises on it dally at home fit a man wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he returns from them. No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many have them already.

——You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should sting us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were fair to look upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming round these women's hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white breasts beneath the laces!

A very simple intellectual mechanism answers the necessities of friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry it about with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand, and is not a repeater, nor a musical watch,—though it is not enamelled nor jewelled,—in short, though it has little beyond the wheels required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises that are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.—Observe, I am talking about minds. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.

If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter. Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books. After all, if we think of it, most of the world's loves and friendships have been between people that could not read nor spell.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood is the sacrifice.

——You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. But I can't help remembering that the world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. The Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think, if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.

What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

——I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.

My young friend,—I replied,—the man who is never conscious of any state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the power of music. The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow, just where it is widening to run upwards into the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of sense rather than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were, logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach of symbols!—Think of human passions as compared with all phrases! Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by the reading of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because Desdemona was maligned? There are a good many symbols, even, that are more expressive than words. I remember a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man can read, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can read, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always to rise above—not the author, but the reader's mental version of the author, whoever he may be.

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words. We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.

——I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned to you some time ago,—I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, strike in, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,—with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

——Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere?—No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

——Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind. Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,—become at home,—entered into relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind. Or take a simple and familiar example. You forget a name, in conversation,—go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,—and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

——I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their portraits.

——Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description. At any rate, when I gave my translation to B.F. to turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local bearing or other,—which the author, of course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with anything on this side the water.

[The above remarks were addressed to the schoolmistress, to whom I handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student came and read over her shoulder,—very curious, apparently, but his eyes wandered, I thought. Seeing that her breathing was a little hurried and high, or thoracic, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more closely.—It is none of my business.—After all, it is the imponderables that move the world,—heat, electricity, love.—Habet.]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;—the mistakes give a relish to it, I think.

LES SOCIÉTÉS POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

Ces Sociétés là sont une Institution pour suppléer aux besoins d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survécu à leurs émotions à l'égard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de l'habitude de boire.

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Sociétés, on doit avoir le moins de cheveux possible. S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux dépilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre. Dès le moment qu'on ouvre la porte de la Société, on a un grand intérêt dans toutes les choses dont on ne sait rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste démontre un nouveau flexor du tarse d'un melolontha vulgaris. Douze savans improvisés, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du culex, se précipitent sur l'instrument, et voient—une grande bulle d'air, dont ils s'émerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est un spectacle plein d'instruction—pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Société. Tous les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours d'une demi heure que O^6 N^3 H^5 C^6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est bonne à rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur très désagréable, selon l'habitude des produits chimiques. Après celà, vient un mathématicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin un x+y, dont vous n'avez pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos relations avec la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations spéciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez jamais soupçonné l'existence. Ainsi il vous décrit les follicules de l'appendix vermiformis d'un dzigguetai. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un follicule. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un appendix vermiformis. Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du dzigguetai. Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaissances à la fois, qui s'attachent à votre esprit comme l'eau adhére aux plumes d'un canard. On connait toutes les langues ex officio en devenant membre d'une de ces Sociétés. Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout celà de suite, et s'instruit énormément.

Il y a deux espèces d'individus qu'on trouve toujours à ces Sociétiés: 1° Le membre à questions; 2° Le membre à "Bylaws."

La question est une spécialité. Celui qui en fait métier ne fait jamais des réponses. La question est une manière très commode de dire les choses suivantes: "Me voilà! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,—je respire encore! J'ai des idées,—voyez mon intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de celà! Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacité, voyez vous! Nous ne sommes nullement la bête qu'on pense!"—Le faiseur de questions donne peu d'attention aux réponses qu'on fait; ce n'est pas là dans sa spécialité.

Le membre à "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les émotions mousseuses et généreuses qui se montrent dans la Société. C'est un empereur manqué,—un tyran à la troisième trituration. C'est un esprit dur, borné, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l'aime pas dans la Société, mais on le respecte et on le craint. Il n'y a qu'un mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce que l'Om est aux Hindous. C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audelà. Ce mot là c'est la CONSTITUTION!

Lesdites Sociétés publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les trouve abandonnés à sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveau-nés, faute de membrane cutanée, ou même papyracée. Si on aime la botanique, on y trouve une mémoire sur les coquilles; si on fait des études zoölogiques, on trouve un grand tas de q[square root]-1, ce qui doit étre infiniment plus commode que les encyclopédies. Ainsi il est clair comme la métaphysique qu'on doit devenir membre d'une Société telle que nous décrivons.

Recette pour le Dépilatoire Physiophilosophique. Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj. Dépilez avec. Polissez ensuite.

——I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as well as I could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that, a depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he played a part in a tabullo.

No,—said I,—I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll tell you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to hit. What if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?—that makes no difference. Everybody in those cities, or almost everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all large places.—You never studied averages, as I have had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the week, through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep several in hand.

——Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?—said the landlady's daughter,—who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for conversation.

I was going to talk about averages,—I said,—but I have no objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind. After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is on one condition,—that he never lays the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters.—The story is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had been preached forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old until it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that number. These old lectures are a man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also,—like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day. One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones, to take out the really good things which don't tell on the audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery. A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

——No, indeed,—I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the average intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high. It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound. A lecture ought to be something which all can understand, about something which interests everybody. I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their manner, whatever they talk about,—even when they don't talk very well.

But an average, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats: a few old folks,—shiny-headed,—slant up best ear towards the speaker,—drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front—(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people,—happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the back-ground, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,—in how many places! I don't say dull people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,—a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture, always. I declare to you, that, as the monk said about the picture in the convent,—that he sometimes thought the living tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,—I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!

——Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,—a thousand faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading a string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses——Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore sold his sensibilities.—Family men get dreadfully homesick. In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of the logs in one's fireplace at home.

"There are his young barbarians all at play,"—

if he owns any youthful savages.—No, the world has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.

——It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of earning a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed. When a person is really full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

——What do I mean by the real talkers?—Why, the people with fresh ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in. Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always formidable,—and one of them was tyrannical.

——Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and never made mistakes.—He? Veneers in first-rate style. The mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the cheap light stuff.—I found —— very fine in conversational information, the other day, when we were in company. The talk ran upon mountains. He was wonderfully well acquainted with the leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians; he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various other mountains that were mentioned. By and by some Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to Major André. A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes. He was very full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion. So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge, that I suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and waited till I got an opportunity.—Have you seen the "New American Cyclopaedia?" said I.—I have, he replied; I received an early copy.—How far does it go?—He turned red, and answered,—To Araguay.—Oh, said I to myself,—not quite so far as Ararat;—that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must have read all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will know more than I ever thought he would.

Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related a similar story. I didn't borrow it, for all that.—I made a comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted and received many compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts. The simile is a very obvious, and, I suppose I may now say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it occurs in a Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore's, published long before my remark was repeated. When a person of fair character for literary honesty uses an image such as another has employed before him, the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently, or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a comparison which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a recollection. I told you the other day that I never wrote a line of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old at once, and often as if it had been borrowed. But I confess I never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from the fact of its obviousness. It is proper, however, that I proceed by a formal instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an idea given to the world at about the time when I had just joined the class in which Waster Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced scholar.

I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing the liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for that reason feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing it, do hereby renounce all claim to being considered the first person who gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison referred to in the accompanying documents, and relating to the pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on the other. I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially all claims to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my supposed property in the above comparison,—knowing well, that, according to the laws of literature, they who speak first hold the fee of the thing said. I do also agree that all Editors of Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above comparison. But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that I had never seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well known that different persons may independently utter the same idea,—as is evinced by that familiar line from Donatus,—

"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixcrunt,"—

now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-disposed persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am open to any accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison, and, if they have so asserted or implied, that they will have the manliness forthwith to retract the same assertion or insinuation.

I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than myself. If I had even suspected that the idea in question was borrowed,—I should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the coincidence, as I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on an idea of Swift's.—But what shall I do about these verses I was going to read you? I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them. I am convinced that several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life, will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through your consciousness at some time. I can't help it,—it is too late now. The verses are written, and you must have them. Listen, then, and you shall hear

WHAT WE ALL THINK.

That age was older once than now, In spite of locks untimely shed, Or silvered on the youthful brow; That babes make love and children wed.

That sunshine had a heavenly glow, Which faded with those "good old days," When winters came with deeper snow, And autumns with a softer haze.

That—mother, sister, wife, or child— The "best of women" each has known. Were schoolboys ever half so wild? How young the grandpapas have grown!

That but for this our souls were free, And but for that our lives were blest; That in some season yet to be Our cares will leave us time to rest.

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain, Some common ailment of the race,— Though doctors think the matter plain,— That ours is "a peculiar case."

That when like babes with fingers burned We count one bitter maxim more, Our lesson all the world has learned, And men are wiser than before.

That when we sob o'er fancied woes, The angels hovering overhead Count every pitying drop that flows And love us for the tears we shed.

That when we stand with tearless eye And turn the beggar from our door, They still approve us when we sigh, "Ah, had I but one thousand more!"

That weakness smoothed the path of sin, In half the slips our youth has known; And whatsoe'er its blame has been, That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.

Though temples crowd the crumbled brink O'erhanging truth's eternal flow, Their tablets bold with what we think, Their echoes dumb to what we know;

That one unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above, Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: GOD is LOVE!

* * * * *

SANDALPHON.

Have you read in the Talmud of old, In the legends the Rabbins have told Of the limitless realms of the air, Have you read it,—the marvellous story Of Sandalphon, the Angel of Glory, Sandalphon, the Angel of Prayer?

How, erect, at the outermost gate Of the City Celestial he waits, With his feet on the ladder of light, That, crowded with angels unnumbered, By Jacob was seen, as he slumbered Alone in the desert at night?

The Angels of Wind and of Fire Chant only one hymn, and expire With the song's irresistible stress,— Expire in their rapture and wonder, As harp-strings are broken asunder By the music they throb to express.

But serene in the rapturous throng, Unmoved by the rush of the song, With eyes unimpassioned and slow, Among the dead angels, the deathless Sandalphon stands listening, breathless, To sounds that ascend from below,—

From the spirits on earth that adore, From the souls that entreat and implore In the frenzy and passion of prayer,— From the hearts that are broken with losses, And weary with dragging the crosses Too heavy for mortals to bear.

And he gathers the prayers as he stands, And they change into flowers in his hands, Into garlands of purple and red; And beneath the great arch of the portal, Through the streets of the City Immortal, Is wafted the fragrance they shed.

It is but a legend, I know,— A fable, a phantom, a show Of the ancient Rabbinical lore; Yet the old mediaeval tradition, The beautiful, strange superstition, But haunts me and holds me the more.

When I look from my window at night, And the welkin above is all white, All throbbing and panting with stars, Among them majestic is standing Sandalphon the angel, expanding His pinions in nebulous bars.

And the legend, I feel, is a part Of the hunger and thirst of the heart, The frenzy and fire of the brain, That grasps at the fruitage forbidden, The golden pomegranates of Eden, To quiet its fever and pain.

* * * * *

MR. BUCHANAN'S ADMINISTRATION.

Mr. Buchanan came into power with the prestige of experience; he was known to have been long in public life; he had been a senator, a secretary, a diplomatist, and almost everything else which is supposed to fit a man for the practical conduct of affairs.

This presumed fitness for office greatly assisted his chances in the Presidential campaign; and it assisted him especially with those timid and conservative minds, of which there are many, apt to conceive that a familiarity with the business and details of government is the same as statesmanship, and to confound the skill and facility acquired by mere routine with a genuine ability in execution. Had these men, however, looked more closely into Mr. Buchanan's official career, they would have found causes for suspecting the validity of their judgment, in the very length and variety of his services. They would have discovered, that, long as these had been and various as they had been, they were quite undistinguished by any peculiar evidences of capacity or aptitude.

He had been, senator, secretary, and diplomatist, it is true; but in no one of these positions had he achieved any remarkable successes. The occasion could not be indicated on which he had risen above the average level of respectability as a public man. There were no salient points in his course,—no splendid developments of mastery,—no great reports, or speeches, or measures, to cause him to be remembered,—and no leading thoughts or acts, to awaken a high and general feeling of admiration on the part of his countrymen. He was never such a senator as Webster was, nor such a secretary as Clay, nor such a diplomatist as Marey. Throughout his protracted official existence, he followed in the wake of his party submissively, doing its appointed work with patience, and vindicating its declared policy with skill, but never emerging as a distinct and prominent figure. He never exhibited any peculiar largeness of mind or loftiness of character; and though he spoke well and wrote well, and played the part of a cool and wary manager, he was scarcely considered a commanding spirit among his fellows. Amid that array of luminaries, indeed, which adorned the Senate, where his chief reputation was made,—among such men as Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Benton, and Wright,—he shone with a diminished lustre.

Now, forty years of action, in the most conspicuous spheres, unillustrated by a single incident which mankind has, or will have, reason to cite and applaud, were not astonishing evidence of fitness for the chief magistracy; and the event has shown, that Mr. Buchanan was to be regarded as an old politician rather than a practised statesman, that the most serviceable soldier in the ranks may prove to be an indifferent general in command,—and that the experience, for which he was vaunted and trusted, was not that ripening discipline of the mind and heart,

———-"which doth attain To something of prophetic strain,"—

but that other unlearning use and wont, which

——"chews on wisdom past, And totters on in blunders to the last."

His administration has been a series of blunders, and worse; it has evinced no mastery; on the other hand, it may be arraigned for inconsistencies the most palpable, for proceedings the most awkward, for a general impotence which places it on a level with that of Tyler or Pierce, and for signal offences against the national sense of decorum and duty.

It is scarcely a year since Mr. Buchanan assumed the reins at Washington. He assumed them under circumstances by which he and his party and the whole country had been taught a great lesson of political duty. The infamous mismanagement of Kansas, by his immediate predecessor, had just shattered the most powerful of our party organizations, and caused a mighty uprising of the masses of the North in defence of menaced freedom. His election was carried amid the extremest hazards, and with the utmost difficulty. Two months more of such ardent debate and such popular enlightenment as were then going forward would have resulted in his defeat. As it was, nearly every Northern State—no matter how firm its previous adherence to the Democratic party—was aroused to a strenuous opposition. Nearly every Northern State pronounced by a stupendous majority against him and against his cause. Nothing but a systematic disguise of the true questions at issue by his own party, and a gratuitous complication of the canvass by means of a foolish third party, saved his followers from the most complete and shameful rout that had been given for many years to any political array. Men of every class, of every shade of faith, joined in that hearty protest against the spirit which animated the Democratic administration, and joined in it, that they might utter the severest rebuke in their power, of its meanness and perfidy.

Mr. Buchanan ought to have read the warning which was thus blazed across the political skies, like the hand-writing upon the wall. He ought to have discerned in this general movement the signs of a deep, earnest, and irrepressible conviction on the part of the North. It is no slight cause which can start such general and enthusiastic expressions of popular feeling; they cannot be manufactured; they are not the work of mere party excitement; there is nothing spurious and nothing hollow in them; but they well up from the deep heart of nations, showing that a chord of sympathy has been touched, with which it is fatal to tamper or to sport. Call it fanaticism, if you will; call it delusion; call it anything; but recollect also that it is out of such feelings that revolutions are born, and by them that awful national crises are determined.

But Mr. Buchanan has not profited, as we shall see, by the monition. His initial act, the choice of a cabinet, in which the only man of national reputation was superannuated, and the others were of little note, gave small hope that he would do so; and his subsequent mistakes might have been augured from the calibre of the counsellors by whom he chose to be surrounded.—But let the men pass, since our object is to discuss measures.

The questions with which the President and his cabinet have had to deal, without following them in the order either of time or importance, may be classified as the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. All these required, for a proper adjustment of them, firmness rather than ability,—a clear perception of the principles of right, rather than abstruse policy,—and vigor of execution, rather than profound diplomatic skill. Yet we do not perceive that our government has displayed, in regard to the treatment of any of these questions, either firmness or ability. It has employed policy enough and diplomacy enough, but the policy has been incoherent and the diplomacy shallow. At the end of the first year of its rule, the most striking result of its general management is the open defection of many of its most powerful friends, and the increased earnestness and energy of all its foes.

The difficulty with the Mormons originated, before the accession of the present administration, in a hasty and improper extension of the Federal authority over a people whose customs and religious opinions were utterly incompatible with those of our own people. The inhabitants of Utah were averse from the outset to the kind of government provided for them at Washington. Having adopted a form of society more like that of Congo and Dahomey than of the United States, and having accepted too literally the prevalent dogma, that every community has the right to form its own institutions for itself,—they preferred the polygamy of barbarism to the monogamy of civilization, and the rod of the priest-prophet Brigham or the seal of Elder Pratt to the sceptre of Governor Steptoe or the sword of Colonel Johnston. Under these circumstances, the duty of the government of the United States was to relinquish its pretensions to supremacy over a nation opposed to its rule, or to maintain that supremacy, if it were necessary, with a strong and unflinching hand. Mr. Buchanan, on his own principles of popular sovereignty, as far as we can understand them, ought, logically, to have adopted the former course, but (as the interests of Slavery were not involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little force was despatched to the Plains when it was too late in the season; a part of it was needlessly delayed in assisting to choke down freedom in Kansas; and when it attained the hills which guard the passages to the valley of the Salt Lake, it found the canons obstructed by snow, and the roads impassable. The supplies required for its subsistence were scattered in useless profusion from Leavenworth to Fort Laramie, and assistance and action were alike hopeless until the arrival of the spring.[A]

[Footnote: A: More recently the energy and wisdom of Col. Johnston have repaired some of the mischief produced by the dilatoriness of his superiors.]

The same feebleness, which left the poor soldier to perish in the desert, has brought an overflowing treasury nearly to default. Mr. Buchanan, in his Message, discussed the existing financial crisis with much sounding phrase and very decided emphasis. He rebuked the action of the banks, which had presumed to issue notes to the amount of more than three times that of their specie, in a tone of lofty and indignant virtue. He commended them to the strictest vigilance and to the exemplary discipline of the State legislatures, while descanting at large upon the safety, the economy, the beauty, and the glory of a sound hard-money currency. When he entered upon his office, he found the Treasury replete with eagles and dimes; it was so flush, that, in the joy of his heart, he ordered the debts of the United States to be redeemed at a premium of sixteen per cent.; and he and his followers were disposed to jubilate over the singular spectacle, that, while all other institutions were failing, the Treasury of the United States was firm and resplendent in its large possession of gold. It was deemed a rare wisdom and success, indeed, which could utter a note of triumph in the midst of so universal a cry of despair; it was deemed a rare piece of liberality, that the government should come to the aid of society in an hour of such dark distress. The stocks of the United States, which had been originally sold at a small advance, were bought back on a very large advance; the usurers and the stock-jobbers received sixteen per cent. for what they had bought at a premium of but two or three per cent.; and an unparalleled glory shone around the easy vomitories of the Treasury. The foresight and the sagacity of the proceeding were marvellous! In less than a quarter by the moon, the coffers of the government were empty,—the very clerks in its employ went about the streets borrowing money to pay their board-bills,—and the grand-master of the vaults, Mr. Cobb, counting his fingers in despair over the vacant prospect, was compelled, in the extremity of his distress, to fill his limp sacks with paper. Of the nineteen millions of gold which in September distended the public purse, little or nothing remained in December, while in its place were paper bills,—founded, not upon a basis of one-third specie, but upon a basis of—We promise to pay! It was a sad application of the high-sounding doctrines of the Message,—a dreadful descent for a pure hard-money government,—and a lamentable conversion of the pompous swagger of October into the shivering collapse of January!

It may be said, that, by this pre-purchase of its own stocks, running at an interest of six per cent., the government has saved the amount of interest which would else have accrued between the time of the purchase and the time of ultimate redemption. And this is true to some extent,—and it would show an admirable economy, if the Treasury had had no other use for its money. A government, like an individual, having a large balance of superfluous cash on hand, can do no better with it than to pay off its debts; but to do this, when there was every prospect of a Mormon war to raise the expenditure, little prospect of retrenchment in any branch of service, and a daily diminishing revenue at all points,—it was purely a piece of folly, a want of ordinary forecast, to get rid of the cash in hand. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Cobb were guilty of this folly, and, for the sake of the poor éclat of coming to the relief of the money-market, (which was no great relief, after all,) they sacrificed the hard-money pretensions of the government, and sunk its character to the level of that of the needy "kiteflier" in Wall Street. Their true course, in the existing condition and aspect of affairs, was to retain their capital, and to institute a most rigid economy, a most searching reduction, in every branch of the public service. We have, however, yet to learn whether any such economy and reduction have been effected.