24 Portland Terrace,
Regent’s Park.
My dear Cowell,
. . . March 12. You see I leave this Letter like an unfinished Picture; giving it a touch every now and then. Meanwhile it lies in a volume of
Sir W. Ouseley’s Travels. Meanwhile also I keep putting into shape some of that Mantic which however would never do to publish. For this reason; that anything like a literal Translation would be, I think, unreadable; and what I have done for amusement is not only so unliteral, but I doubt unoriental, in its form and expression, as would destroy the value of the Original without replacing it with anything worth reading of my own. It has amused me however to reduce the Mass into something of an Artistic Shape. There are lots of Passages which—how should I like to talk them over with you! Shall we ever meet again? I think not; or not in such plight, both of us, as will make Meeting what it used to be. Only to-day I have been opening dear old Salámán: the original Copy we bought and began this time three years ago at Oxford; with all my scratches of Query and Explanation in it, and the Notes from you among the Leaves. How often I think with Sorrow of my many Harshnesses and Impatiences! which are yet more of manner than Intention. My wife is sick of hearing me sing in a doleful voice the old Glee of ‘When shall we Three Meet again?’ Especially the Stanza, ‘Though in foreign Lands we sigh, Parcht beneath a hostile Sky, etc.’ How often too I think of the grand Song written by some Scotch Lady, [318] which I sing to myself for you on Ganges Banks!
Slow spreads the Gloom my Soul desires,
The Sun from India’s Shore retires:
To Orwell’s Bank, with temperate ray—
Home of my Youth!—he leads the Day:
Oh Banks to me for ever dear,
Oh Stream whose Murmur meets my Ear;
Oh all my Hopes of Bliss abide
Where Orwell mingles with the Tide.
The Music has come to me for these Words, little good otherwise than expressive: but there is no use sending it to India. To India! It seems to me it would be easy to get into the first great Ship and never see Land again till I saw the Mouth of the Ganges! and there live what remains of my shabby Life.
But there is no good in all such Talk. I never write to you about Politics in which you know I little meddle. . . . March 20. Why, see how the Time goes! And here has my Letter been lying in Sir W. Ouseley for the last ten days, I suppose. To-day I have been writing twenty pages of a metrical Sketch of the Mantic, for such uses as I told you of. It is an amusement to me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them. I don’t speak of Jeláleddín whom I know so little of (enough to show me that he is no great Artist, however), nor of Hafiz, whose best is untranslatable because he is the best Musician of Words. Old Johnson [319] said
the Poets were the best Preservers of a Language: for People must go to the Original to relish them. I am sure that what Tennyson said to you is true: that Hafiz is the most Eastern—or, he should have said, most Persian—of the Persians. He is the best representative of their character, whether his Sáki and Wine be real or mystical. Their Religion and Philosophy is soon seen through, and always seems to me cuckooed over like a borrowed thing, which people, once having got, don’t know how to parade enough. To be sure, their Roses and Nightingales are repeated enough; but Hafiz and old Omar Khayyám ring like true Metal. The Philosophy of the Latter is, alas!, one that never fails in the World. ‘To-day is ours, etc.’
While I think of it, why is the Sea [320] (in that Apologue of Attár once quoted by Falconer) supposed to have lost God? Did the Persians agree with something I remember in Plato about the Sea and all in it being of an inferior Nature, in spite of Homer’s ‘divine Ocean, etc.’ And here I come to the end of my sheet, which you will hardly get through, I think. I scarce dare to think of reading it over. But I will try.