NATURAL DESCRIPTIONS IN THE PERSIAN WRITERS. 55 



often heavy and overcharged with artificial adornment. If, 

 in accordance with 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 limit 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 praise to enter upon an expedition to the Caspian Sea, 

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

 by Enweri, Dschelaleddin Rumi (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 senses. J As Joseph von Hammer has remarked, in 

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

 JBosiati and Gulistan (Fruit and Rose 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 of 

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

 bastic affectation too frequently mars the descriptions of na- 

 ture. ^ The darhng subject of Persian poetry, the "loves of 



* G5the, in his Commentar zum wesi-osilichen Divan, bd. vi., 1828, 

 v73, 78, and HI. 



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



X See Jos. von Hammer, Gcsch. der schonen Redekunste Persiens, 

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

 lentury, and in whose poem on the Schedschai a remarkable allusion 

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

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

 Dschelaleddin Ahdad; and 8. 403, concerning Feisi, who stood forth at 

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

 OhazuU there breathes an Indian tenderness of feeling. 



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

 ihe inelegant expression of Chodschah Abduiia VVassaf, 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 



