1836.] 



Persian poets. 



385 



poems of Hafiz must be taken in a literal or in a figurative sense ; but 

 the question does not admit of a general and direct answer ; for even 

 the most enthusiastic of his commentators allow, that some of them are 

 to be taken literally, and his editors ought to have distinguished them, as 

 our Spenser has distinguished his four odes on Love and Beauty, instead 

 of mixing the profane with the divine by a childish arrangement, 

 according to the alphabetical order of the rhymes. Hafiz never pre- 

 tended to more than human virtues, and it is known that he had human 

 propensities ; for, in his youth, he was passionately in love with a girl 

 surnamed " Shakh-i-Nebat, or the branch of sugar-cane," and the 

 prince of Shiraz was his rival. 



" Since there is an agreeable wildness in the story, and since the poet 

 himself alludes to it in one of his odes,. I give it you at length from the 

 commentary." There is a place called Pir-i-sabz, or the green old man, 

 about four Persian leagues from the city ; and a popular opinion had 

 long prevailed, that a youth, who should pass forty successive nights in 

 Pir-i-sabz without sleep, would infallibly become an excellent poet. 



u Young Hafiz had accordingly made a vow that he would serve that 

 apprenticeship with the utmost exactness, and for thirty nine days he 

 rigorously discharged his duty, walking every morning before the house 

 of his coy mistress, taking some refreshment and rest at noon, and 

 passing the night awake at his poetical station. But on the fortieth 

 morning, he was transported with joy on seeing the girl beckon to him, 

 through the lattices and invite him to enter. She received him with 

 rapture, declared her preference of a bright genius to the son of a 

 king, and would have detained him all night, if he had not recollected 

 his vow, and, resolving to keep it inviolate, returned to his post. 



" The people of Shir a z add (and the fiction is founded on a couplet of 

 Hafiz) that early next morning an old man in a green mantle, who was 

 no less a person than Khizr himself approached him at Pir-i-sabz 

 with a cup brimful of nectar, which the Greeks would have called the 

 water of Aganippe, and rewarded his perseverance with an inspiring 

 draught of it. After his juvenile passions had subsided, we may sup- 

 pose that his mind took that religious bent, which appears in most of 

 his compositions." 



The learned natives of India with whom I have conversed on this 

 subject, will by no means admit that the wine, love, and intoxication of 

 Hafiz have reference in any of his compositions to mere terrestrial 

 enjoyments, alleging that if he hat thus broken the law of the Prophet, 

 he could never have entered the gates of paradise, which the following 

 story, they say, proves he did. On Hafiz's death, the Moollas refused 

 his corpse the rites of sepulture, stating that he had forfeited all right 

 thereunto by the loose and highly immoral tendency of his works and 

 course of life. This affair excited considerable dissension and alterca- 



