NAITHAI, i)l«CKirTIONS I ,\ rili: J'!;RS1A\ writers, tii) 



often heavy and overcharged with artiiicial adornment. li\ 

 in accordance wdth the opinion of the Persians themselves. ' 

 we award the highest praise to that which we may designate 

 by the terms spirit and wit, we must hmit our admiration to 

 the productiveness of the Persian poets, and to the infinite di- 

 versity of forms imparted to the materials which they employ ; 

 depth and earnestness of feeling are wholly absent from their 

 writings.* 



Descriptions of natural scenery do but rarely interrupt the 

 narrative in the historical or national Epos of Firdusi. It 

 seems to me that there is much beauty and local truthfulness 

 in the description of the mildness of the climate and the force 

 of the vegetation, extolled in the praise of the coast-land of 

 Mazanderan, which is put into the mouth of a wandering 

 bard. The king, Kei Kawus, is represented as being excited 

 by this j)raise to enter upon an expedition to the Caspian Sea, 

 and even to attempt a new conquest.! The poems on Spring 

 by Enweri, Dschelaleddin Humi (who is esteemed the greatest 

 mystic poet of the East), Adhad,= and the half-Indian Feisi, 

 generally breathe a tone of freshness and life, although a pet- 

 ty striving to play on words not unfrequently jars unpleasant- 

 ly on the senses4 As Joseph von Hammer has remarked, in 

 his great work on the history of Persian poetry, Sadi, in his 

 Bostan a7id Gulistan (Fruit and Pwose Gardens), may "be re- 

 garded as indicating an age of ethical teaching, while Hafiz, 

 whose joyous views of life have caused him to be compared 

 to Horace, may be considered by his love-songs as the type oi' 

 a high development of lyrical art ; but that, in both, bom- 

 bastic affectation too frequently mars the descriptions of na- 

 ture. § The darling subject of Persian poetry, the "loves of 



* Gothe, iu his Commentar zum west-dstlichen Divan, bd. vi., 1828, 

 s. 73,78, and 111. 



t See Le Livre des Rois, public par Jules Molil, t. i., 1838, p. 487. 



X See Jos. vou Hammer, Gesch. der schonen Redekiinste Persiens, 

 1818, s. 96, concerniug Ewliadeddin Enweri, who lived iu the twelfth 

 ceutury, aud iu whose poem ou the Sckedschai a remarkable allusiou 

 has been discovered to the mutual attraction of the heavenly bodies ; s. 

 183, concerniug Dschelaleddin Rumi, the mystic; s. 259, concerning 

 Dschelaleddin Alidad ; and s. 403, concerning Feisi, who stood forth al 

 the court of Akbar as a defender of the religion of Brahma, and in whose 

 Ghazuls there breathes an Indian tenderness of feeling. 



$ " Night comes on when the ink-bottle of heaven is overturned," is 

 the inelegant expression of Chodschah Abdulla Wassaf, a poet who has, 

 however, the merit of having been the first to describe the great as- 

 tronomical observatory' of Meragha, with its lofty gnomon. Hilali. of 

 Asterabad. makes the disk of the moon glow with heat, and regards 



