All other singers, however, are accounted by the Turks inferior to the great lyric poet Baqi (1526-1600). Baqi was at first a saddler, but he studied law and rose to the highest legal position of the empire. Poetry was the avocation of the great lawyer's leisure, and it won him the admiring friendship of the four successive Sultans who reigned during his life. The very name Baqi means "that which lasts," or "the enduring," so it has been frequently punned upon. The poet himself used a seal with a Persian couplet,
"Fleeting is the world, and without faith
God alone endures (or, Baqi alone is god); all else is fleeting"
OLD TURKISH TALES
THE QUEEN OF NIGHT
Once upon a time there was an old man who had three daughters. All of them were beautiful, but the youngest, whose name was Rosa, was not only more lovely, but also more amiable and more intelligent than the others. Jealous and envious exceedingly were the two sisters when they found that the fame of Rosa's beauty was greater than the fame of theirs. They, however, refused to believe that Rosa was really more lovely than they were, and they resolved to ask the Sun's opinion on the subject.
So, one day at dawn, the sisters stood at their open window and cried, "Sun, shining Sun, who wanderest all over the world, say who is the most beautiful among our father's daughters?"
The Sun replied, "I am beautiful, and you are both beautiful; but your youngest sister is the most beautiful of all."