An the leven flash from those smiling lips, ✿ Morn breaks and the rays dusk and gloom o’erthrow.
And when with her graceful shape she sways, ✿ Droops leafiest Bán-tree[[289]] for envy low:
Me her sight suffices; naught crave I more: ✿ Lord of Men and Morn, be her guard from foe!
The full moon borrows a part of her charms; ✿ The sun would rival but fails his lowe.
Whence could Sol aspire to that bending grace? ✿ Whence should Luna see such wit and such mind-gifts know?
Who shall blame me for being all love to her, ✿ ’Twixt accord and discord aye doomed to woe:
’Tis she won my heart with those forms that bend ✿ What shall lover’s heart from such charms defend?
——And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
Now when it was the Seven Hundred and Thirty-second Night,
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when the Prince had made an end of his verses, the Princess strained him to her bosom and kissed him on the mouth and between the eyes; whereupon his soul returned to him and he fell to complaining to her of that he had endured for stress of love and tyranny of longing and excess of transport and distraction and all he had suffered for the hardness of her heart. Hearing those words she kissed his hands and feet and bared her head,[[290]] whereupon the gloom gathered and the full moons dawned therein. Then said she to him, “O my beloved and term of all my wishes, would the day of estrangement had never been and Allah grant it may never return between us!” And they embraced and wept together, whilst she recited these couplets:—