PERSIA HISTORY, LANGUAGE, LITERATURE 365 



the city of nightingales and roses. Hafiz is a poet's poet and one of 

 the world's greatest lyrists; some acquaintance with his exquisite 

 odes belongs to true culture. 



If there were time, I should like to discuss the metaphysical poet 

 Jalal ad-Din Rumi, of the thirteenth century, and the mystic Jami, 

 who lived two centuries later, and to draw a comparison between their 

 verses and the mystic poetry, sensuous imagery, and transcendental 

 symbolism of the seventeenth-century English poets Donne and 

 Crawshaw, or the Purple Island of Phineas Fletcher. Space also 

 forbids me to include in the list dozens of minor names from Abu 

 Said ibn Khair, an author of quatrains who died in 968, or Kamal 

 of Isfahan, 1200, to the prose of the late Shah Nasir ad-Din's diary 

 of his journey to Europe in 1889. Among the curiosities of Persian 

 literature, moreover, is a culinary poet, Bushak of Shiraz and Isfahan, 

 who lived in the fifteenth century and whose verses in praise of the 

 cuisine would delight the heart of a gourmand; or again the clothes- 

 poet, Mahmud Kari of Yezd, in the sixteenth century, whose lyre 

 responded to the Sartor Resartus theme of robes and garments. 

 Though the times to-day do not favor a poet's birth nor foster the 

 cultivation of the Muses, the Persian race has not forgotten how to 

 sing, and a renaissance of the poetic art may come perchance some 

 day with a new order of things. 



Little space remains for adding a few words about the influence of 

 Persia on our own poetry. In the earlier ages Persia was little known 

 to England except as a name, yet Chaucer alludes to Persian blue, 

 "pers," in the Prologue, and "robes de pers" occur in the French 

 original of the Romaunt which Chaucer translated. Marlowe has 

 Persian names and Persian scenes in his Tamburlaine; and Shake- 

 speare alludes to Persian attire in King Lear and to a Persian prince 

 in Merchant of Venice, as well as to a voyage to Persia in his Comedy 

 of Errors. Milton, besides making other allusions, summarizes the 

 earlier history of Persia in his Paradise Regained, and Shelley recalls, 

 the pillared halls of Persepolis in a passage in Alastor. Byron's 

 Giaour and Lander's Gebir hark back to the old Zoroastrian faith of 

 Iran, and Matthew Arnold and Edmund Gosse have already been 

 cited as falling under the spell of Firdausi. A dozen other instances 

 of Persian influence on English poets might be cited, the best known 

 being Tom Moore, whose Lalla Rookh fills the senses with the melody 

 and perfume, color and beauty, tenderness and tremulous ecstasy, 

 which is associated in imagination with the East. 



In the realm of English prose, two volumes of Persian Tales were 

 widely read in Europe in the latter part of the eighteenth century, 

 and the so-called Arabian Nights are really largely Persian. The 

 inimitable Persian novel, Hajji Baba of Isfahan, by Morier, is so 

 thoroughly Oriental that Persians who read English mistake it for 



