tions
were fully reconciled with the theory of human existence which was
nothing more or less than an optimistic hedonism. There is nothing
parallel to this in classic literature. The greatest of Roman
Epicureans, the materialist, whose maxim was: enjoy the present for
there is no God, and no to-morrow, speaks despairingly of that drop of
bitterness, which rises in the fountain of Delight and brings torture,
even amid the roses of the feast. It is with mocking irony that Dante
places Epicurus in the furnace-tombs of his Inferno amid those
heresiarchs who denied the immortality of the soul. Hafiz was an
Epicurean without the atheism or the despair of Epicurus. The roses in
his feast are ever fresh and sweet and there is nothing of bitterness in
the perennial fountain of his Delight. This unruffled serenity, this
joyful acceptance of material existence and its pleasures are not in the
Persian poet the result of the carelessness and shallowness of Horace,
or the cold-blooded worldliness and sensuality of Martial. The theory of
life which Hafiz entertained was founded upon the relation of the human
soul to God. The one God of Sufism was a being of exuberant benignity,
from whose creative essence proceeded the human soul, whose experiences
on earth were intended to fit it for re-entrance into the circle of
light and re-absorption into the primeval fountain of being. In
accordance with the beautiful and pathetic imagery of the Mystic, life
was merely a journey of many stages, and every manifestation of life
which the traveller met on the high road was a manifestation and a gift
of God Himself. Every stage on the journey towards God which the soul
made in its religious experience was like a wayside inn in which to rest
awhile before resuming the onward course. The pleasures of life, all
that charmed the eye, all that gratified the senses, every draught that
intoxicated, and every fruit that pleased the palate, were, in the
pantheistic doctrine of the Sufi considered as equally good, because God
was in each of them, and to partake of them was therefore to be united
more closely with God. Never was a theology so well calculated to put to
rest the stings of doubt or the misgivings of the pleasure-seeker. This
theology is of the very essence of Hafiz's poetry. It is in full
reliance on this interpretation of the significance of human existence
that Hafiz faces the fierce Tamerlane with a placid smile, plunges
without a qualm into t