Its body from the quarry is, from “No Place” is its soul.
’Tis only in the glorious world my bird its splendor shows,
The rosy bowers of Paradise its daily food bestows.[[278]]
The poet’s life had been such that the clergy refused to read the burial service over his body when he died, his friends, however, obviated the difficulty by stratagem, and it was decided that scattered couplets from his odes should be placed in a bowl and drawn therefrom by a child, the disposition of the body to be settled by the sense of the couplet thus drawn out. The child took out the following distich:
“Withhold not your step from the bier of Hāfiz,
For, though sunk in sin, he goes to Paradise.”
And upon the strength of the evidence thus received the body was given an honorable burial.
FIFTH PERIOD.
The fifth period of her literature, beginning with the fourteenth century, and ending about the close of the fifteenth, marks a stationary condition in the Persian world of letters.
The sons and grandsons of Timūr, although at variance in their political interests, vied with each other in the encouragement of scholars, and for a time the literary world retained its brilliancy. Astronomy as well as history flourished at this period, and great mathematicians were also in favor with royalty.