“The lilies white prolonged
    Their sworded tongue to the smell;
  The clustering anemones
    Their pretty secrets tell.”

Presently we have,—­

——­“All day the rain Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain, The flood may pour from morn till night Nor wash the pretty Indians white.”

And so onward, through many a page.

The following verse of Omar Chiam seems to belong to Hafiz:—­

  “Each spot where tulips prank their state
  Has drunk the life-blood of the great;
  The violets yon fields which stain
  Are moles of beauties Time hath slain.”

As might this picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri:—­

  “O’er the garden water goes the wind alone
    To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave;
  The fire is quenched on the dear hearth-stone,
  But it burns again on the tulips brave.”

Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.

Hafiz says,—­

“Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.”

Ibn Jemin writes thus:—­

  “Whilst I disdain the populace,
  I find no peer in higher place. 
  Friend is a word of royal tone,
  Friend is a poem all alone. 
  Wisdom is like the elephant,
  Lofty and rare inhabitant: 
  He dwells in deserts or in courts;
  With hucksters he has no resorts.”

Dschami says,—­

  “A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe,
    So much the kindlier shows him than before;
  Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw,
    He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor.”

Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations, though it forms the staple of the “Divan.”  He has run through the whole gamut of passion,—­from the sacred, to the borders, and over the borders, of the profane.  The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him.  From the plain text,—­

  “The chemist of love
    Will this perishing mould,
  Were it made out of mire,
    Transmute into gold,”—­

or, from another favorite legend of his chemistry,—­

  “They say, through patience, chalk
    Becomes a ruby stone;
  Ah, yes, but by the true heart’s blood
    The chalk is crimson grown,”—­

he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress.  The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika’s cheek, she was at a loss:—­

  “And since round lines are drawn
    My darling’s lips about,
  The very Moon looks puzzled on,
    And hesitates in doubt
  If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
  Be not her true way to the South.”