These, although through the poetic beauty of our European tastes they may not prove quite agreeable, give yet sufficient evidence that the inhabitants of Central Asia, apart from the roughness of their social relations, despite their incessant wars and forays, are not unskilled in the expression of traits of poetic feeling and tender love. The higher classes, though they do not look on the popular poetry with contempt, still wish to show traces of refined taste, a higher education, and enjoy the works of the elder Persian poets, or the books of Nevai, who stepped forward as the first of the Tchagatay poets in that kind of accomplishment, by which all the rest of the poets of the Islamitish polite world acquired renown. Nevai is a scholar of the celebrated Sheikh Abdurrahman Djami, during many years minister, field marshal, and governor of many provinces. He is of rare genius in poetry, and of great fertility; for he has produced more than thirty-two distinct works on poetry, history, morals, logic; and though his works are thoroughly Persian in spirit, and not pervaded with the spirit of Central Asia, yet the merit of having reined and ennobled the Turkish dialect of Central Asia cannot be taken from him.
Here I give a few specimens.
Nevai.
1. Oh! heart, come, let us seek out a love; the cypress-growing one, the silver-cheeked one, let us seek.
2. As the darling of our eyes has looked for another friend, we also have eyes; therefore, another let us seek.
3. She greets the glance of men only with the dust of death. Why stand longing here? Another beauty let us seek.
4. Should I not find another like thee, who destroyest all the world, then a lowly, modest, but tender one, I will seek.
5. We will hasten through field and plain for the loved one; we will search garden and meadows. Her will we seek.
6. As the wish is good, it shall not remain unfulfilled. Among small and great, through all as far as possible, we wish to seek.