410 COSMOS. 



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

 by Enweri, Dschelaleddin Riimi (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 petty 

 striving to play on words not unfrequently jars unpleasantly 

 on the senses.f As Joseph von Hammer has remarked, in his 

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

 Bostan and Gulistan (Fruit and Rose Gardens) may be regarded 

 as indicating an age of ethical teaching, whilst Hafiz, whose 

 joyous views of life have caused him to be compared to 

 Horace, may be considered by his love-songs as the type of a 

 high development of lyrical art; but that in both bombastic af- 

 fectation too frequently mars the descriptions of nature. J The 

 darling subject of Persian poetry, the " loves of the night- 

 ingale and the rose," recurs with wearying frequency, and a 

 genuine love*of nature is lost in the East amid the artificial 

 conventionalities of the language of flowers. 



On passing northward from the Iranian plateaux through 

 Turan (Tuirja in the Zend) to the Uralian Mountains, 

 which separate Europe and Asia, we arrive at the primitive 

 seat of the Finnish race ; for the Ural is as much a land of the 

 ancient Fins as the Altai is of the ancient Turks. Among 

 the Finnish tribes who have settled far to the west in the low- 



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



^ See Jos. von Hammer, Gesch. der schonen Redekunste Persiens, 

 1818, s. 96 concerning Ewhadeddin Enweri, who lived in the twelfth cen- 

 tury, and in whose poem on the Schedschai a remarkable allusion has been 

 discovered to the mutual attraction of the heavenly bodies; s. 183, con- 

 cerning Dschelaleddin Rumi, the mystic; s. 259, concerning Dschelaled- 

 din Ahdad; and s. 403, concerning Feisi, who stood forth at the court 

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

 there breathes an Indian tenderness of feeling. 



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

 the inelegant expression of Chodschah Abdullah Wassaf, a poet who 

 has, however, the merit of having been the first to describe the great 

 astronomical observatory of Meragha, with its lofty gnomon. Hilali, of 

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

 evening dew as " the sweat of the moon." (Jos. von Hammer^ s, 247 

 and 371.) 



Tuirja or Turan are names whose etymology is still unknown. 

 Burnouf (Yacna, t. i. pp. 427-430) has acutely called attention to 

 the Bactrian Satrapy of Turiua or Turiva mentioned in Strabo (lib. 

 xi. p. 517, Gas.); Du Theil and Groskurd would, however, substitute the 

 reading of Tapyria; see the work of the latter, th. ii. s. 410. 



