16 S 

 VIIL 



On the MYSTICAL POETRY of the PERSIANS and 

 .HINDUS. — J5y the President. 



A FIGURATIVE mode of expreiTing the fervour of devotion, or the 

 ardent love of created fpirits toward their beneficent creator, has 

 prevailed from time immemorial in ^fo; particularly among the Perjian 

 theifts, both ancient Hujhangis and modern Sufis, who feem to have bor- 

 rowed it from the Indian philofophers of the Vedanta fchool g and their 

 doctrines are alfo believed to be the fource of that fublime, but poetical, 

 theology, which glows and fparkles in the writings of the old Academicks. 

 " Plato travelled into Italy and Egypt, lays Claude .Fleury, to learn 

 " the Theology of the Pagans at its fountain-head:" its true fountain, 

 however, was neither in Italy nor in Egypt, (though considerable ftreams of 

 it had been conduced thitherby Pythagoras and by the family of Misra) 

 but in Perjia or lndia % which the founder of the Italiek feet had vifited 

 with a fimilar defign. What the Grecian travellers learned among the fages 

 of the eaft, may perhaps be fully explained, at a feafon of leifure, in ano- 

 ther dijTertation.; but we confine this effay to a lingular fpecies of poetry, 

 which confifts almoft wholly of a myftical religious allegory, though it 

 Teems on a tranfient view to contain only the fentiments of a wild and volup- 

 tuous libertinifm : now, admitting the danger of a poetical ftyle, in which 

 the limits between vice and enthuilafm are fo minute as to be hardly 

 tliitinguimable, we mud beware of cenfuring it feverely, andmuft allow it 

 to be natural, though a warm imagination may carry ( it to a culpable excefs^ 

 for an ardently grateful piety is congenial to the undepraved nature of man, 

 ••whofe-mind, iinking under the magnitude of the. fubjed, and ■ftruggling to 



