God spurns the riches of a thousand coffers,
And says, 'The saint is he his heart who offers;

Nor gold nor silver seek I, but above
All gifts the heart, and buy it with My love:
Yea! one sad, contrite heart which men despise
More than My throne and fixed decree I prize';
The meanest heart that ever man has spurned
Is a clear glass where God may be discerned.

The following ode, translated by the late Professor
Falconer, is frankly pantheistic:--

I was, ere a name had been named upon earth,
Ere one trace yet existed of aught that has birth:
When the locks of the Loved One streamed forth for a sign
And Being was none, save the Presence Divine.
Named and name were alike emanations from Me,
Ere aught that was 'I' yet existed, or 'We';
Ere the veil of the flesh for Messiah was wrought,
To the Godhead I bowed in prostration of thought;
I measured intently, I pondered with heed
(But, ah, fruitless my labour!) the Cross and its Creed:
To the pagod I rushed and the Magian's shrine,
But my eye caught no glimpse of a glory divine;
The reins of research to the Kaaba I bent,
Whither hopefully thronging the old and young went;
Candahar and Herat searched I wistfully through,
Nor above nor beneath came the Loved One to view.
I toiled to the summit, wild, pathless and lone,
Of the globe-girding Kaf,[55] but the Anka[56] had flown!
The seventh earth I traversed, the seventh heaven explored,
But in neither discerned I the court of the Lord.
I questioned the Pen and the Tablet of Fate,
But they whispered not where He pavilions His state;
My vision I strained, but my God-scanning eye
No trace that to Godhead belongs could descry.
My glance I bent inward: within my own breast
Lo, the vainly sought elsewhere! the Godhead confessed!

Jalaluddin's chief work, the Masnavi, containing upwards of 26,000
couplets, was undertaken at the instance of one of his disciples and
intimates, Husam-ud-din, who had often urged him to put his teaching
into a written form. One day when Husam-ud-din pressed the subject upon
him, Jalaluddin drew from his turban a paper containing the opening
couplets of the Masnavi, which are thus translated by Mr. Whinfield:--

Hearken to the reed flute, how it discourses,
When complaining of the pains of separation:--
'Ever since they tore me from my ozier-bed,
My plaintive notes have moved men and