SHEIK SADI. 
695 
few lines from that song will shew what this side of the city was 
in the day of his veneration. 
“ Boy, give me wine, for Paradise does not boast such lovely 
banks as those of Rocknabad, nor such groves as the high- 
scented fragrance of the bowers of Mosella.” 
O 
But another poet has said, “ Though the bowers of Love grew 
on its banks, and the sweet song of Hafiz kept time with the 
nightingale in the rose, the summer is past, and all things are 
changed. The pleasant arbour is sought, but not found ; the 
voice of the bird and of the minstrel have ceased ; a burning sun 
beats on the unsheltered stream, which runs sobbing away; like a 
misused orphan, not only deprived of the home of its parent, 
but driven from its weeping position near his grave.” 
The change is, indeed, what these lines describe; the clear 
and refreshing stream of Rocknabad, impeded by the accumu¬ 
lated consequences of utter neglect, has abandoned its wonted 
course; and all else, which before marked the place, being in 
like manner rent or mouldered away; in a short time even the 
stone that tells the poet’s name must be defaced, and nothing 
remain to distinguish his grave, from that of the rudest clod of 
earth encumbering his invaded cemeterv. 
The last resting-place of Sheik Sadi, the second boast of Shiraz, 
was my next object. The import of his verses particularly com¬ 
mand reverence to the character of the poet; though some 
writers of the noblest strains, in our own country, put “ so 
strange a face on their own perfection,” as to profess that the 
purpose of poetry is to amuse rather than to instruct. But nei¬ 
ther Homer, nor Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Milton, nor any of that 
glorious school of the lyre, shewed themselves of this opinion. 
They speak the language of the gods, because the words they use 
