ys,
birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and
sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on
these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the
natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the
play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him
for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the
poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most
unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world.
Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:--"Bring
wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's independence, what is
sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?"--and
sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the
eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:--

"I am: what I am
My dust will be again."

A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is
not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a
supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule holds,--[Greek:
sunetois phonei], it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for
poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot's, or, as at other
times, with an eagle's quill.

Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your
subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general,
what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to
grandees? Yet in the "Divan" you would not skip them, since his muse
seldom supports him better.

"What lovelier forms things wear,
Now that the Shah comes back!"

And again:--

"Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike
down.
Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening
his spear."

And again:--

"Mirza! where thy shadow falls,
Beauty sits and Music calls;
Where thy form and favor come,
All good creatures have their home."

Here are a couple of stately compliments to his Shah, from the kindred
genius of Enweri:--

"Not in their houses stand the stars,
But o'er the pinnacles of thine!"

"From thy worth and weight the stars
gravitate,
And the equipoise of heaven is thy house's
equipoise!"

It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a
handsome youth,--

"Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy
of Schiraz!
I would give for the mole on thy cheek S