No entrance finds—no word of this and that;
Do Thou my separate and derived self
Make one with Thy essential! Leave me room
On that divan (sofa) which leaves no room for two:
Lest, like the simple Kurd of whom they tell,
I grow perplext, O God, ’twixt ‘I’ and ‘Thou.’
If ‘I’—this dignity and wisdom whence?
If ‘Thou’—then what is this abject impotence?”
[The fable of the Kurd, which is also told in verse, is this. A Kurd left the solitude of the desert for the bustle of a busy city. Being tired of the commotion around him, he lay down to sleep. But fearing he might not know himself when he arose, in the midst of so much commotion, he tied a pumpkin round his foot. A knave, who heard him deliberating about the difficulty of knowing himself again, took the pumpkin off the Kurd’s foot, and tied it round his own. When the Kurd awoke, he was bewildered, and exclaimed—
“Whether I be I or no,