rious name,

Although long ages have passed with no NUSHIRWAN here.

Do good, my friend, while thou canst, and seize thy life as a prey,

Ere the cry rises in the street: 'Such an one is gone!''*

This insight into life runs through the 'Gulistan;' no tinsel deceives him for an instant. Hear how he weighs the lot of the despot and the derwish in

this life and the next:

'A KING was regarding with a scornful eye a company of derwishes. One of them, acute enough to divine his feelings, said: 'O king! in this world we are inferior to thee in military pomp, but happier in our enjoyment; in death, thy equals; and at the day of judgment, if it please the Most High GoD, thy superiors.''

A similar feeling appears in the following, and how deeply beautiful is the couplet which closes it:

'A KING said to a holy man: 'Dost thou ever remember me?' 'Yes,' he replied, 'whenever I forget my GOD.'

'If I had feared the Most High God as thou fearest the Sultan, I should have been of the number of the just.'

VERSES.

'COULD he cease from all thoughts of earthly ease and pain,

The derwish's foot would touch the sky;
And if the vizier but feared his GoD
As he fears his king, he would be an angel.'

Nor are Sadi's stories drawn only from human experience, as seen in others' lives or his own; the resources of fable are also at his command, and many a charming specimen may be quoted from his works. Fable indeed has been always native to the East, since the days of Pilpay and Lokman; and its graver writers have not scrupled to employ it (like Dryden in his 'Hind and Panther') in the service of philosophy and religion-forgetful that these must lie beyond its sphere, since no effort of the imagination can suppose beasts to share in their interests. Two of Sadi's are too well known to need quotation ciation with the rose, and the drop of the clay that gained its perfume by assorain that fell into the sea and became a pearl. The following are less familiar; the first we give in Professor Eastwick's graceful translation:

'I SAW some handfuls of the rose in bloom, With bands of grass suspended from a dome:

I said: What means this worthless grass, that it

Should in the rose's fairy circle sit?'
Then wept the grass, and said: 'Be still,
and know

The kind their old associates ne'er forego;
Mine is no beauty, hue, or fragrance, true!
But in the garden of my lord I grew!''

rior to Horace, whom he also resembles in his curiosa felicitas.' Without, however, claiming for him so eminent a place, there can be no question that Sadi's sparkling wit lends a great charm to the 'Gulistan.' Beside the varied interest of the stories, the sudden turns of thought and quick repartees of the dialogue add an air of great lightness and vivacity, which is heightened by a profusion of lively antitheses and ingenious conceits. We have selected a few of these scattered sayings, some of which have quite the point of proverbs: 'THOUGH a Guebre keep his fire alight an hundred years,

If he once fall into its flame it will burn him.'

'You must bear with patience suppliants like

me,

For none throws a stone at a tree that bears no fruit.'

'THE deep sea is not turbid for a stone, The sage that is vexed is a shallow brook still.'

'Ir the king declares that the day is night, You must answer: 'See, there are the moon and the Pleiads!''

'EITHER the merchant with both his hands gathers gold into his bosom,

Or else the wave one day tosses him dead on the beach.' *

Some of his shorter stories display a good deal of caustic humor; as that of the doctor, who gives to his pupil the following advice to get rid of his friends, when their visits took up too much of his time: Lend to such as are poor, and ask to borrow of such as are rich; and neither will trouble you any more: ' or that of the derwish, who had been struck on the head by a stone, and having no power to return the blow, had carefully laid the stone by, until, years after, finding his enemy in a pit, where the king's displeasure has thrown him, he creeps stealthily up and returns the old blow with the identical stone!

Sadi's poetry is of no very high order, yet it is always light and graceful. A vein of real feeling runs through it

*There is an untranslatable play on the two meanings of kanár, 'the bosom' and 'the shore.'

all, like a little silver thread; and there is plenty of fancy in the images and thoughts. Moreover, his verses in the 'Gulistan' are always short; the subject is handled with so light a touch, and the transitions are so rapid from theme to theme, that the reader is never wearied, but is lured on from story to story, verse to verse, with an ever-fresh variety.

How beautiful, and yet how thoroughly Oriental, is the following tetarstich:

THE muezzin* unseasonably raised his voice from the minaret,

For he knows not how much of the night is gone.

Ask the length of the night from my eyelashes,

For not one moment hath sleep passed on

my eyes!'

Or these lines on youth and age:

'WHEN thou art old, let go thy childishness; Leave to the young sport and merriment, Seek not from the old man the gladness of

youth;

For the stream that hath flowed by shall never return;

Now that the corn is ripe for the sickle, It waves not in the wind like the young blade.'

There are some striking lines on Jacob and Joseph, with a mystical reference under them to the changing state of the holy man in his communion with GOD, 'for the vision of the pious is between effulgence and obscurity':

ONE asked of that once desolate father: 'O old man! bright of soul and wise of knowledge,

Thou didst smell the breath of thy son's garment from Egypt, Why then sawest thou him not in Canaan's pit?'

'My state,' he answered, 'is as the light

At another I see not my own feet for dark

ness.

If the derwish remained at one stay forever,

He might wash his hands of both worlds.''* The following lines might almost suggest the thought that Sadi had read the words of St. Paul, that if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it;' and it is at least singular that they occur in a story where Sadi represents himself as offering prayers at the tomb of Yahya, or John the Baptist, at Damascus:

'THE sons of ADAM are members one of another,

For in their creation they have a common
origin;

If fortune bring one member into pain,
To the other members remains no rest;
And thou who feelest not for another's sor-
row,

Hast no claim to the name of man.'

Sadi was a man of deep religious feeling, and there are ample proofs of it in his books. Like most Persian authors, be adopts the mystical phraseology of the Sufis; but we find in him far less of this style than in most of his contemporaries. It is confined chiefly to scattered verses, and incidental allusions, which just serve to give a shade of deeper coloring to the 'Gulistan's varied picture. Such are lines like these:

'KNOWEST thou what that nightingale of dawn said to me?

'What man art thou who art ignorant of love?'

All that thou seest is loud in extolling HIM; The heart, that is an ear, well knows the mystery;

'Tis not the nightingale alone that sings His praise to the rose,

For in His praise its every thorn is a tongue!'

A deep feeling of natural piety breathes through such lines as the following, which express a sentiment such as one would hardly have looked for in a Mohammedan:

The wicked repent them of their sins, But the holy seek forgiveness for their worship.'

Sadi, although a derwish and recluse, (for the latter years of his life were spent in retirement,) had too deep an insight into character to be deceived by the hermit's exterior; and his true estimate of seclusion is thus given :

'IF every moment thy heart be wandering, Even in solitude thou wilt find no purity; And though wealth, rank, fields, and merchandise be thine,

If thy heart be with Gop, thou art still a hermit.'

The idea in the following lines is a favorite with him, and occurs several times in different forms:

'SHOULD the creature injure thee, sorrow not;

For from the creature cometh neither joy nor pain.

Know, from God is the contrariety of friend and foe,

For the heart of each is in His disposal. What though the arrow speeds from the

bow?

With all its grave

service,

For in my obedience I have no claim.

* That is, attain his reunion with God.

it is by this amount of truth involved in its system, that it still keeps its ground as it does? Contrasted with the litera

ture of a heathen nation even of Greece or Rome - how far more noble and elevating are the moral ideas of the Arabians and the Persians!

Sadi may have met with Christians in his various wanderings, especially with Nestorians and Armenians, but in his day the deep heart-burnings which the successive invasions of the Crusaders had raised were not yet quelled; and in his own case, the treatment which he had received at their hands at Tripolis was little likely to prepossess him in favor of their doctrines. Sadi's travels, in truth, except so far as they led him in contact with individuals, were exclusively confined to the Mohammedan world. Within that wide circle he wandered 'with hungry heart,' like Ulysses of old, and his keen eye read with intensest interest the ever-varying pictures of human character; but beyond that sphere all was hid from him in Cimmerian darkness. Dim rumors may have reached him of Europe and its king

doms, like Homer's 'great river Ægyptus;'* but it was in Asia that he was at home. It was to the Mohammedan world that all his sympathies were bounded; Europe, with all its rude strength and energy, is non-extant to him. The declining feudal system and the rising municipal towns lay beyond the Mohammedan's gaze: modern Europe was slowly bursting into life, but he knew it not. The decrepit Byzantine empire still lingered at Constantinople, and its shadow hid the substance from his eyes. Little did Sadi dream that during his very lifetime Asia's sun was finally setting, to rise with fresh splendor in the West. He could see and mourn the shadows which were fast gathering over the East, in the fall of dynasties and the ruin of empires; but it was not for him to see, beyond the horizon, modern Europe slowly gather ing together her latent elements, or to hear the herald of modern thought, Dante, singing his first song.

PINS.

CONFOUND the whole thing! does it ever rain? Or rather, why, when it rains, does it not rain really? If there is any one thing in the whole course of nature worse than this perpetual mizzling, drizzling, half-way attempt at a wet day, I should like to know what it is! There is, to be sure, just enough of it to make that dismal pattering which some people, with more imagination than nerves, call cheerful; but which I, with a strict regard for truth and practical effects, persist in believing the most powerful incentive to suicide or emigration to Egypt, a spot on which, veracious travellers inform us, it never

rains.

The simple question is: What shall I do? It is impossible to spend the whole of one day in yawning. It will not pay.

Well, what?

mitted to any boarding-house on the appearance of that trunk; or, if I was, my board would be rigorously demanded in adyance, even unto the last cent. I have not been fairly to the bottom of that trunk for ten years. So long, indeed, that the memory of man goeth not to its entire contents.

'Tis well! I shall dispel the foul fiend ennui by a rummage, and that directly. I shall see whether this canvas-covered mockery of a secret can hide aught from our prying eyes.

How the key creaks unpleasantly in the lock, uttering a weak and puerile complaint against being disturbed. Whew! what an odor of potted notions salutes the nose as the lid goes up! A mingled aroma of mouldy letters breathing love, passion, hate, sorrow, and ambition. Keepsakes once beyond all purchase, now representing only so much dead capital. Here I have this box filled with little memory-links that once were so precious. I open it, and the first thing I bring ruthlessly forth to the light is this lock of dark, silken hair. Oh! nonsense! Yes, I don't doubt for an instant that the matter is very commonplace. We have all passed through this. We have all saved, once upon a time, our locks of dark brown, or some other colored, hair. Therefore, is it no nonsense, and therefore is it that I shall speak of mine own lock. One of my first loves, Lizzie Tompkins: I am really shocked to think that I should have cast the treasure from my vest watch-pocket where it had lain so many months; but when I consider again the provocation, I am not so shocked. Did she not know that I

loved her,

to a box. Poor Lizzie! She made a bad match of it when, many years after, she married. The last time I saw her was a few years since. She was old and careworn, and informed me, with a smirk, that she had six children, and a husband who was a policeman.

even unto the expending of my entire financial capital in a box of prunes, gaily bedizened with a picture upon the lid, and gilded sides; and yet did she not, in the very face of this, allow my hated rival to sit next her upon the stoop one summer evening, and Stealthily to play with her hand? I Was right when I tore the brown lock Away from my heart, and consigned it

VOL. LXIII.

9

And this candy-heart, smelling strongly still, through the lapse of years, of the original peppermint. That was the gift of Maria, who, full of fun, presented it as her own heart. I believe, though I cannot speak with certainty, that I jilted Maria. I think I loved Maria, until one day a singular rumor found its way to mine car. It was that Maria was subject to fits. Why this should have had so dreary an effect upon my youthful imagination, I cannot tell, but thenceforth I never wished to be left alone with Maria, nor did she seem a desirable property to own. She, too, married poor, worthless, pale-faced youth, and now, at the latest advices, Maria was showing an overweening anxiety to become divorced from a recreant and absent husband.

This retrospective is not charming! We must go deeper and unearth the more tangible things.

A faded ambrotype. I shall dismiss it, for the simple reason that I cannot distinguish whether it is Martha or Caroline, and, what is still worse, I cannot remember.

Two pairs of once dove-colored gloves, now verging towards a mottled brown. They are tied to the recollection of a wedding-party-a night, when, in the wild exuberance of a disappointed affection for the bride, I became sufficiently grief-stricken to require the services of a waiter to find my way to the door and down the steps.

Next-some entomological pins. What a strange passion to be sure! I can

hardly realize now, at the distance of nearly fifteen years, that I ever could have taken delight in transfixing unfortunate bugs and butterflies, and preserving them on walls and wainscots, in