The taper teaches us both to laugh and to weep; it laughs through the flame of shining merriment, albeit it melts at the same time in hot tears; in the act of consumption it spreads wide the brightness of joviality. This is also the general character throughout of this type of poetry.
Among the objects frequently referred to in Persian poetry we may mention flowers and jewels, and, above all, the rose and the nightingale. It is a matter of frequent occurrence to represent the nightingale as bridegroom of the rose. This gift of personality to the rose and love to the nightingale may be abundantly illustrated from Hafis. "Out of gratefulness, O rose," he sings, "that thou art the sultana of Beauty, see to it that thou settest not a proud face to the love of the nightingale." The poet himself speaks of the nightingale of his own soul. When we of the West, on the contrary, refer in our poetry to roses, nightingales, or wine, and such matters, we do so in a wise much nearer to prose. The rose merely serves us for ornament, as in the expression, among others, "garlanded with roses." If we listen to the nightingale it is but to follow the bird with our own emotions; we think of the grape-juice, and call it "the breaker of our cares." Among the Persians, however, the rose is no mere image or ornament, no symbol, but itself appears to the poet as possessed with a soul, as loving bride, and he transpierces with his spirit the rose's very heart. Precisely the same character of a gorgeous Pantheism is still impressed on the most modern Persian poems. Herr von Hammer, for instance, has given us a description of a poem which was forwarded, among other gifts of the Shah, to the Emperor Francis in the year 1819. It contains an account of the exploits of the Shah in 33,000 distiches, who made a present of his own name to the Court poet in question.
(c) Goethe, too—here in contrast with the more perturbed atmosphere and the concentrated emotion of the poetry of his youth—was carried away in advanced age by the breadth of this careless and blithesome spirit; and though already a veteran, swept through by the breath of the East, dedicated the evening glow of his poetic passion, in a flood of extraordinary fervour to this freedom of emotion which, even where controversy is the sub ect-matter, still retains the beauty of its careless temper. The songs of his Westöstlicher Divan, are by no means the mere play of trivial social urbanities, but originate in a precisely similar spirit of free and unrestrained emotion. In a song of his to Suleica they are thus described by himself:
Pearls from the poet,
Thine is the treasure,
Thine was the big swell
Of passion tumultuous,
Which strewed them on desolate
Strand of his life.
Gold-tips I call it,
Pierced with bright jewels,
Tenderly conned o'er
By tapering fingers.
"Take them," he exclaims to his beloved:
Circle thy neck with them,
Close, close to thy breast!
These raindrops of Allah
The meek shell hath ripened.
Poetry such as this is the product of an experience of the widest range, a sense which has held its own in many storms, a depth and also, too, a youth of the heart—in other words:
World of Life's own drift of forces,
World, the wealth of whose wave-roll
Caught afar the bulbul's passion,
Won the song which shook the soul.
3. In this unity of pantheism, moreover, if emphasized in its relation to personal life, which feels itself united with God thereby, and the Divine as this presence intuitively cognized, we have, speaking generally, that type of mysticism which, under this more intimate mode, has also been elaborated in the pale of Christendom. We will adduce but one example, namely, that of Angelus Silecius, who, with the greatest audacity and depth of conception and emotional fervour, has expressed the essential presence of God in objective Nature, the union of the self with God, and the Divine with human personality, with an extraordinary power of mystical presentment. The more genuine type of Oriental pantheism, on the contrary, is inclined to insist more upon the vision of the One substance in all phenomena and the self-surrender of the individual, who thereby secures the most supreme expansion of conscious life no less than the bliss of absorption into all that is most noble and excellent by virtue of the absolute release from all finitude.