To every side shall he wander whom God drives from His gate; Had I but served my God with half the zeal A vizier went to Zu'l-nun of Egypt, and requested the aid of his prayers, saying, I am day and night employed in the service of the sultan, hoping for his favour and dreading his wrath.' Zu'l-nun wept, and said, '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, As he fears his king, he would be an angel. getful 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, the clay that gained its perfume by association with the rose, and the drop of rain 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, Then wept the grass and said, 'Be still, and know Mine is no beauty, hue, or fragrance, true! In the leaves of the Koran I found a peacock's feather; partees 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 Though a Guebre keep his fire alight an hundred years, 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. If 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 humour; 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 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 tetrastich: The muezzint unseasonably raised his voice from the minaret, Or these lines on youth and age: When thou art old, let go thy childishness; Seek not from the old man the gladness of youth; 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 lightning, Which one moment gleams and the next disappears. There is an untranslatable play on the two meanings of kanár, 'the boson" and the shore.' + 'I was awakened this morning, about an hour before sunrise, by the crowing of cocks and the voice of the muezzin, heard beautifully through the stillness of the night, as he summoned all true believers to the house of prayer, proclaiming that 'prayer is better than sleep.''-Pashley's Crete, i. p. 285. 1856.] His Religious Feeling. At one time I sit on heaven's highest pinnacle, 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 291 singular that they occur in a story The sons of Adam are members one of another, To the other members remains no rest; Sadi was a man of deep religious feeling, and there are ample proofs of it in his books. Like most Persian authors, he 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 colouring to the Gulistan's varied picture. Such are lines like these: Know'st thou what that nightingale of dawn said to me? 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, 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 : : I have brought an excuse for my defect of service, 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, And though wealth, rank, fields, and merchandize be thine, The idea in the following lines is a favourite 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. What though the arrow speeds from the bow? Sadi's addresses to the Deity abound with striking thoughts; witness these fine lines from the opening of the Gulistan. Oh loftier than all thought, That is, attain his re-union with God. Past is our festive day, Nor must we forget, when we would estimate Sadi's true character and position, that these thoughts and feelings have been the product of Mohammedanism's sterile soil. With all its grave errors, by its unwavering acknowledgment of the divine Unity, Mohammedanism has been an immense advance on the paganism and idolatry which it superseded; and may we not affirm, that it is by this amount of truth involved in its system, that it still keeps its ground as it does? Contrasted with the literature of a heathen nationeven 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 heartburnings 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 favour 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 rumours may have reached him of Europe and its kingdoms, 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 splendour 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 gathering together her latent elements, or to hear the herald of modern thought, Dante, singing his first song. SONNET. SORROW should visit us when we are young, While in fresh spring they bow to it and last? * Odyssey, iv. 447. T. B. 1856.] 293 KATE COVENTRY. An Autobiography. EDITED BY THE AUTHOR OF 'DIGBY GRAND.' CHAPTER IX. So the bells rung merrily at Dangerfield, and the rustics huzzaed for their landlord, and the comely village maidens envied the bride; and Lucy was Lady Horsingham now, with new duties and a high position, and a large, fine, gloomy house, and jewels in her hair, and an aching heart in her bosom. Nevertheless, she determined to do her duty as a wife; and every hour of the day she resolved not to think of Cousin Edward. Years elapsed, and pretty Lucy became a gentle, handsome woman -kindly courteous, and beloved by all, timid and shrinking only with Sir Hugh. Her husband, wearied and discontented, mixed himself fiercely in all the intrigues of the day-became a stanch partisan of the House of Stuart, and sought for excitement abroad in proportion as he missed congeniality of feeling at home. It was an unhappy household. Their one child was the mother's sole consolation; she scarcely ever let it out of her pre. sence. They were a pretty sight, that loving couple, as they basked, in the sun of a fine summer's morning, on the terrace in front of the manor-house. The boy with his mother's blue eyes and his own golden curls, and the arch, merry smile that he never got from stern Sir Hugh; and the fair, graceful woman, with her low white brow and her soft brown hair, and her quiet gestures and gentle, sorrowing face-that face that haunts poor Cousin Edward still. 'Mamma!' says the urchin, pouting his rosy lips, why don't you play with me?-what are you thinking of?' and a shade passes over that kind face, and she blushes, though there is no one with her but the child, and catches him up and smothers him in kisses, and says, You, my darling,' but nevertheless, I do not think at that moment she was thinking either of her boy or Sir Hugh. And where was Cousin Edward all the time? Why, at that particular instant sword-point to swordpoint with Colonel Bludyer of the Dragoons, slightly wounded in two places-cool and wary, and seeming to enjoy, with a sort of fierce pleasure, such a safety-valve for excitement as a duel with one of the best fencers in Europe. Cousin Edward was an altered man since he stood with the future Lady Horsingham in the moonlight. 'An evil counsellor is despair;' and he had hugged that grim adviser to his heart. He had grown handsomer, indeed, than ever; but the wild eye, the haggard brow, and the deep lines about his mouth, spoke of days spent in fierce excitement nights passed in reckless dissipation. He had never forgotten Lucy through it all, but even her image only goaded him to fresh extravagances-anything to deaden the sting of remembrance-anything to efface the maddening past. Cousin Edward, too, became a Jacobite; and was there a daring scheme to be executed, a foolhardy exploit to be performedlife and limb to be risked without a question-who so ready and so reckless as 'handsome Ned Meredith?' So In the course of their secret meetings and cabals, he became slightly acquainted with Sir Hugh Horsingham; and with the inexplicable infatuation peculiar to a man in love, he took a pleasure in even being near one so closely connected with Lucy, although that one was the very person who had deprived him of all he valued on earth. So it fell out that Sir Hugh Horsingham and Ned Meredith were supping at the Rose and Thistle, in close alliance, the table adjoining them being occupied by those |