He has written great and small.
Sinners are weeping,
The just are rejoicing.
The poet of the people nowhere occupies himself with casting about for a fine subject; he writes of what he feels and of what he sees. The Armenian peasant sees the snow in winter; in summer he sees the flowers and the birds—only birds and flowers are to him the pleasanter sight, so he sings more about them. He rarely composes any verse without a flower or a bird being mentioned in it; all his similes are ornithological or botanical, and by them he expresses the tenderest emotions of his heart. There is a pathos, a simplicity really exquisite in the conception of some of these little bird-and-flower pieces, as, for example, in the subjoined "Lament of a Mother" over her dead babe:
I gaze and weep, mother of my boy,
I say alas and woe is me wretched!
What will become of wretched me,
I have seen my golden son dead!
They seized that fragrant rose
Of my breast, and my soul fainted away;