ain intimate and avowed piety, obviously in sympathy with
the feeling of his nation, is habitual to him. All the forms of courtesy
and of business in daily life take a religious tinge, as did those of
Europe in the Middle Age.

With the exception of a few passages, of which we need not stop to give
account, the morality of the "Gulistan" and the "Bostan" is pure, and so
little clogged with the superstition of the country that this does not
interfere with the pleasure of the modern reader: he can easily
translate their ethics into his own. Saadi praises alms, hospitality,
justice, courage, bounty, and humility; he respects the poor, and the
kings who befriend the poor. He admires the royal eminence of the
dervish or religious ascetic. "Hunger is a cloud out of which falls a
rain of eloquence and knowledge: when the belly is empty, the body
becomes spirit; when it is full, the spirit becomes body." He praises
humility. "Make thyself dust, to do anything well." "Near Casbin," he
tells us, "a man of the country of Parthia came forth to accost me,
mounted on a tiger. At this sight, such fear seized me that I could not
flee nor move. But he said,--'O Saadi, be not surprised at what thou
seest. Do thou only not withdraw thy neck from the yoke of God, and
nothing shall be able to withdraw its neck from thy yoke.'"

In a country where there are no libraries and no printing, people must
carry wisdom in sentences. Wonderful is the inconsecutiveness of the
Persian poets. European criticism finds that the unity of a beautiful
whole is everywhere wanting. Not only the story is short, but no two
sentences are joined. In looking through Von Hammer's anthology, culled
from a paradise of poets, the reader feels this painful discontinuity.
'Tis sand without lime,--as if the neighboring desert had _saharized_
the mind. It was said of Thomson's "Seasons," that the page would read
as well by omitting every alternate line. But the style of Thomson is
glue and bitumen to the loose and irrecoverable ramble of the Oriental
bards. No topic is too remote for their rapid suggestion. The Ghaselle
or Kassida is a chapter of proverbs, or proverbs unchaptered, unthreaded
beads of all colors, sizes, and values. Yet two topics are sure to
return in any and every proximity,--the mistress and the name of the
poet. Out of every ambush these leap on the unwary reader. Saadi, in the
"Gulistan," by the necessity of the narrative, corrects this arid
looseness,