were, but reflected there
Still group on group, advancing to the brink,
As group on group retired link by link;
For one pale lamp that floated out of view
Five brighter ones they quickly placed anew;
At length the slackening multitudes grew less,
And the lamps floated scattered and apart.
As stars grow few when morning's footsteps press
When a slight girl, shy as the timid halt,
Not far from where we stood, her offering brought.
Singing a low sweet strain, with lips untaught.
Her song proclaimed, that 'twas not many hours
Since she had left her childhood's innocent home;
And now with Beara lamp, and wreathed flowers,
To propitiate heaven, for wedded bliss had come"

To these lines Mrs. Carshore (who has been in this country, I believe,
from her birth, and who ought to know something of Indian customs)
appends the following notes.

"_It was the Beara festival_." Much has been said about the Beara or
floating lamp, but I have never yet seen a correct description. Moore
mentions that Lalla Rookh saw a solitary Hindoo girl bring her lamp to
the river. D.L.R. says the same, whereas the Beara festival is a Moslem
feast that takes place once a year in the monsoons, when thousands of
females offer their vows to the patron of rivers.

"_Moslem Jonas_" Khauj Khoddir is the Jonas of the Mussulman; he, like
the prophet of Nineveh, was for three days inside a fish, and for that
reason is called the patron of rivers."

I suppose Mrs. Carshore alludes, in the first of these notes, to the
following passage in the prose part of Lalla Rookh:--

"As they passed along a sequestered river after sunset, they saw a young
Hindoo girl upon the bank whose employment seemed to them so strange
that they stopped their palanquins to observe her. She had lighted a
small lamp, filled with oil of cocoa, and placing it in an earthern
dish, adorned with a wreath of flowers, had committed it with a
trembling hand to the stream: and was now anxiously watching its
progress down the current, heedless of the gay cavalcade which had drawn
up beside her. Lalla Rookh was all curiosity;--when one of her
attendants, who had lived upon the banks of the Ganges, (where this
ceremony is so frequent that often, in the dusk of evening, the river is
seen glittering all over with lights, like the Oton-Jala or Sea of
Stars,) informed the Princess that it was the usual way, in which the
friends of those who h