rolls and
reading aloud such odes on Modesty and Beauty, are as inspiring as the
star-crowned night. And every chink in my terrace walls seems to
breathe a message of sweetness and light and love.

"Know you not the anecdote about the enchanting Goddess Rabia, as
related by Attar in his _Biographies of Sufi Mystics and Saints_? Here
it is. Rabia was asked if she hated the devil, and she replied, 'No.'
Asked again why, she said, 'Being absorbed in love, I have no time to
hate.' Now, all the inhabitants of my terraces and fields seem to echo
this sublime sentiment of their Goddess. The air and sunshine, nay,
the very rocks are imbued with it. See, how the fissures in the
boulders yonder seem to sympathise with the gaps in the terrace walls:
the cyclamen leaves in the one are salaaming the cyclamen flowers in
the other. O, these terraces would have delighted the heart of the
American naturalist Thoreau. He could not have desired stone walls
with more gaps in them. But mind you, these are not dark, ugly,
hollow, hopeless chinks. Behind every one of them lurks a mystery. Far
back in the niches I can see the busts of the poets who wrote the
poems which these beautiful wild flowers are reading to me. Yes, the
authors are dead, and what I behold now are the flowers of their
amours. These are the offspring of their embraces, the crystallised
dew of their love. Yes, this one single, simple act of love brings
forth an infinite variety of flowers to celebrate the death of the
finite outward shape and the eternal essence of life perennial. In
complete surrender lies the divineness of things eternal. This is the
key-note of the Oriental mystic poets. And I incline to the belief
that they of all bards have sung best the song of love. In rambling
through the fields with these beautiful children of the terraces, I
know not what draws me to Al-Fared, the one erotic-mystic poet of
Arabia, whose interminable rhymes have a perennial charm. Perhaps such
lines as these,--

'All that is fair is fairer when she rises,
All that is sweet is sweeter when she is here;
And every form of beauty she surprises
With one brief word she whispers in its ear:

'Thy wondrous charms, O let them not deceive thee;
They are but borrowed from her for a while;
Thine outward guise and loveliness would grieve thee,
If in thine inmost soul she did not smile.

'All colours, forms, into each other merging,