embodiment of all virtue and beauty, had loved him, he believed
himself to be an object of adoration to all feminine hearts, and
grimly resolved that all womankind must suffer in expiation of his own
sufferings.

During the winter there arrived another student from Germany, who,
becoming acquainted with Bodenstedt, arranged to share with him the
lessons in Tartar and Persian, which Mirza-Schaffy was pleased to call
"hours of wisdom." In course of time other friends joined the circle,
so that finally arose a formal divan, where the wise man of Gjaendsha
discoursed less on personalities, dwelling chiefly on general
effusions of wisdom, interspersed with many a song. One of the latter
reads as though designed by Bodenstedt to indicate the relation borne
by Mirza-Schaffy to his own productions:

Thou art of my song the begetter;
Its drapery putteth my wand on;
Thou yieldest the purest of marble,
And I lay the sculpturing hand on.

Thou givest the spirit, the essence:
Me for utt'rance alone mak'st demand on--
Oft my power's deficient, and madly
Thy crude thoughts I haste to expand on.

Sundry songs extolling the beneficence of wine and earthly pleasure
arose at this period. Of these we find none more attractive than that
which owed its origin to a conversation held in the divan of wisdom
concerning certain Russians and Georgians who drank wine more freely
than the camels drank water, yet had gained no inspiration therefrom:

From wine's fiery fascination
From the goblet's mystic pleasure,
Poison foams, and sweet refreshment,
Beauty flows, and degradation,
As the drinker's worth may measure,
According to his brain's assessment.

In debasement deeply sunken
Lies the fool, through wine's might captur'd:
When _he_ drinks becomes he drunken;
When _we_ drink we are enraptured.
Sparkling gleams of wit, worth dreaming,
Flash from tongues like angel's seeming,
And with ardor we are teeming,
And alone with beauty drunken.

Well resembles wine the shower
Which to mire fresh mire amasses,
But to fair fields brings a dower
Rich in blessing as it passes.

One evening Bodenstedt discovered his worthy teacher singing before
a house on whose roof sat a graceful maiden, and from the man's whole
manner then and thereafter concluded that in the long-faithful heart
had been at last replaced the image of Zuleikha. And so it proved. On
the very evenin