devices of
taste and culture and good-fellowship,--by the cheap elegances, the fine
endearments, all the small, sweet courtesies of life. They will approve
the beneficence and the power of the Great Mother; they will demonstrate
to farmers the possibility of large and generous living; they will teach
them to distinguish between the mountebanks of pretended science and the
apostles of that science which alone is truth; they will give to thought
a new direction, to energy a new impulse, to earth a new creation, to
man a new life.

SAADI.

Whilst the Journal of the Oriental Society attests the presence of good
Semitic and Sanskrit scholars in our colleges, no translation of an
Eastern poet has yet appeared in America. Of the two hundred Persian
bards of whose genius Von Hammer Purgstall has given specimens to
Germany, we have had only some fragments collected in journals and
anthologies. There are signs that this neglect is about to be retrieved.
In the interval, while we wait for translations of our own, we welcome
the announcement of an American edition, if it be only a careful
reprint, of the "Gulistan" of Saadi,--a book which has been current in
Asia and Europe now for six hundred years. Of the "Gulistan or
Rose-Garden" there exist three respectable English translations. That of
Gladwin is to be preferred for its more simple and forcible style. Mr.
Gladwin has not thought fit to turn into rhyme the passages of verse
with which the "Gulistan" is interspersed. It is the less important,
that these verses are seldom more than a metrical repetition of the
sentiment of the preceding paragraph. Mr. Eastwick's metrical renderings
do not make us regret their omission. Mr. James Ross, in an "Essay on
the Life and Genius of Saadi," has searched the works of his author, as
well as outside history, for biographical facts or personal allusions.

The slowness to import these books into our libraries--mainly owing, no
doubt, to the forbidding difficulty of the original languages--is due
also in part to some repulsion in the genius of races. At first sight,
the Oriental rhetoric does not please our Western taste. Life in the
East wants the complexity of European and American existence; and in the
writing of the primitive nations a certain monotony betrays the poverty
of the landscape, and of social conditions. Every word in Arabic is said
to be derived from the camel, the horse, or the sheep. We fancy we are
soon familiar wi