a leaf,'
It would not lose its convictions from their censure,
Nor vex its bosom with their loud reproof;
And though sea and land should join in concert,
Exclaiming, 'O wanderer, thou hast lost thy road!'
Not an atom of doubt would fall into its soul,
Nor a shade of sorrow at the scorner's scorn.

(_Professor Cowell's translation._)

Like all quietists, Jalaluddin dwells on the importance of keeping the
mind unclouded by anger and resentment, as in the following little
parable:--

One day a lion, looking down a well,
Saw what appeared to him a miracle,
Another lion's face that upward glared
As if the first to try his strength he dared.
Furious, the lion took a sudden leap
And o'er him closed the placid waters deep.
Thou who dost blame injustice in mankind,
'Tis but the image of thine own dark mind;
In them reflected clear thy nature is
With all its angles and obliquities.
Around thyself thyself the noose hast thrown,
Like that mad beast precipitate and prone;
Face answereth to face, and heart to heart,
As in the well that lion's counterpart.
'Back to each other we reflections throw,'
So spake Arabia's Prophet long ago;
And he, who views men through self's murky glass,
Proclaims himself no lion, but an ass.

As Ghazzali had done before him, Jalaluddin sees in the phenomena of
sleep a picture of the state of mind which should be cultivated by the
true Sufi, "dead to this world and alive to God":--

Every night, O God, from the net of the body
Thou releasest our souls and makest them like blank tablets;
Every night thou releasest them from their cages
And settest them free: none is master or slave.
At night the prisoners forget their prisons,
At night the monarchs forget their wealth:
No sorrow, no care, no profit, no loss,
No thought or fear of this man or that.
Such is the state of the Sufi in this world,
Like the seven sleepers[58] he sleeps open-eyed,
Dead to worldly affairs, day and night,
Like a pen held in the hand of his Lord.

--(_Professor Cowell._)

As we have seen, Jalaluddin's conception of God is a far higher one than
is embodied in the orthodox formula of the Koran, "Say: God is One. He
neither begetteth nor is begotten." With Jalaluddin God is far more
immanent than transcendent. In one place he says, "He who beholdeth God
is godlike," and in another, "Our attributes are c