Sonnets by the Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur

Produced by Olaf Voss and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Love is not discoverable by the eye, but only by the soul. Its elements are indeed innate in our mortal constitution, and we give it the names of Joy and Aphrodite; but in its highest nature no mortal hath fully comprehended it .
Every one choose the object of his affections according to his character…. The Divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and by these the wings of the soul are nourished .
1917
The following Sonnet Sequence,—written during rare intervals of leisure in a busy and strenuous life,—was privately printed in Madras early in 1914, without any intention of publication on the part of the author. He has, however, now consented to allow it to be given to a wider audience; and we anticipate in many directions a welcome for this small but significant volume by the writer of India to England , one of the most popular and often-quoted lyrics evoked by the Great War.
The Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur, was born in the State of Hyderabad, but educated in England; and there are some—at Cambridge and elsewhere—who will remember his keenly discriminating interest in British history and literature, and the comprehensive way he, in a few words, would indicate his impressions of poets and heroes, long dead, but to him ever-living.
His appreciation was both ardent and just; he could swiftly recognise the nobler elements in characters which at first glance might seem startlingly dissimilar; and he could pass without apparent effort from study of the lives of men of action to the inward contemplations of abstruse philosophers.
To those who have not met him, it may appear paradoxical to say that his tastes were at the same moment acutely fastidious and widely sympathetic; but anyone who has talked with him will recall the blend of high impersonal ideas with a remarkable personality which seldom failed to stimulate other minds—even if those others shared few if any of his intellectual tastes.