Hafiz by this time had grown old. Youth had been very pleasant; not without a sigh the grey-haired man relinquished it. “Ah, why has my black hair turned white!” he laments, and tries to warm his old blood with the wine of former days. “Yesterday at dawn I came upon one or two glasses of wine—as sweet as the lip of the Cup-bearer they seemed to my palate. And then, my brain afire, I desired to return to my mistress, Youth, but between us a divorce had been pronounced.” And again: “Last night Hafiz strayed into the tavern, and it seemed to him that Youth, his mistress, had come back, and that love and madness had returned to his old head.” “Gieb meine Jugend mir zurück!” Other poets besides Hafiz have sung to the same tune. Whether or no he lived to witness the over­throw of the race that had sheltered him, he foresaw the troubles that were coming upon it and upon his beloved Shiraz. There is a short poem full of foreboding which is said to have been written after the entry of Timur: “What tumult I see beneath the moon's orbit, every quarter of the earth is full of evil and wickedness! There is strife among our daughters, and among our mothers contention, and the father is evilly disposed towards his son. Only the foolish are drinking sherbet of rose-water and sugar; the wise are nourished upon their own heart's blood. The Arabian horse is wounded beneath the saddle, and the ass wears a collar of gold about his neck. Master, take the counsel of Hafiz: ‘Go and do good!’ for I see that this maxim is worth more than a treasure-house of jewels.” In several verses he congratulates Mansur upon a victory and a fortunate return to Shiraz, which may perhaps refer to the re-establishment of the Muz-affaride line after Timur's departure. “Give me the cup,” he says in one of these, “for the airs of youth blow through my old head, so glad am I to see the King's face again.”

The date of his death is variously given as 1388, 1389, 1391, and 1394, but it seems unlikely that he should have been alive as late as 1394. 1389 is the year given in a couplet by an unknown author, which is inscribed upon his tomb: “If thou wouldst know when he sought a home in the dust of Mosalla, seek his date in the dust of Mosalla.” The letters of the Persian words Khak-i-Mosalla, dust of Mosalla, give the number 791, that is 1389 of our era. He lies in the garden of Mosalla outside Shiraz, a garden the praises of which he was never tired of singing, and on the banks of the Ruknabad, where he had so often rested under the shade of cypress-trees. When, some sixty years after the poet's death, Sultan Baber conquered Shiraz, he erected a monument over the tomb of Hafiz. An oblong block of stone on which are carved two songs from the Divan, marks the grave. At the head of it is inscribed a sentence in Arabic: “God is the enduring, and all else passes away.” The garden contains the tombs of many devout Persians who have desired to rest in the sacred earth which holds the bones of the poet, and his prophecy that his grave should become a place of pilgrimage for all the drunkards of the world has been to a great extent fulfilled. A very ancient cypress, said to be of Hafiz's own planting, stood for many hundreds of years at the head of his grave, and “cast its shadow o'er the dust of his desire.”

It is not often that a teacher and the favourite of princes enjoys unmixed popularity, especially when his criticisms of such as disagree with him are as harsh and as often repeated as are those of Hafiz; nor does he seem to have been an exception to the general rule. Moreover, his own conduct gave his enemies sufficient grounds for complaint. His biographers, as biographers will, take a rosy view of his life. Daulat Shah, for instance, states that “he turned always to the company of dervishes and of wise men, and sometimes he attained also to the society of princes; a friend of persons of eminent virtue and perfection, and of noble youths.” But such accounts as these are not entirely borne out by other traditions, and his poems do not seem to the unbiased reader to be the works of a man of ascetic temperament. With all due deference to Daulat Shah, I would submit that Abu Ishac, Shah Shudja, and Shah Mansur were none of them persons of eminent virtue; indeed, it is difficult to imagine that a friend and panegyrist of theirs could have renounced all the joys of life. His enemies went so far as to accuse him of heresy and even of atheism, and so strong was popular feeling against him that, on his death, it was debated whether his body might be given the rites of burial. The question was only settled by consulting his poems, which, on being taken at haphazard, opened upon the following verse: “Fear not to follow with pious feet the corpse of Hafiz, for though he was drowned in the ocean of sin, he may find a place in paradise.” It is a fortunate age which will allow a man's writings to stand his doubtful reputation in such good stead.

Hafiz was married and he had a son. He laments the death of both wife and child in two poems which are translated in this volume. In spite of all the favours which he received from the great men of his day, he is said to have died poor.

During his lifetime he was too busy “teaching and composing philosophical treatises,” says his great Turkish editor, Sudi, “to gather together his songs; he used to recite them in his school, express­ing a wish that these pearls might be strung together for the adornment of his contemporaries.” This was done after his death by his pupil Sayyed Kasim el Anwar, and the Divan of Hafiz is one of the most popular books in the Persian language. From India to Constantinople his songs are sung and repeated by all who speak the Persian tongue, and the number of his European translators shows that his uncle's curse has a special and peculiar influence in Western countries. Like the Æneid, the Divan of Hafiz is consulted as a guide to future action. There are several stories of famous men who have had recourse to these Sortes Hafizianœ. It is related that Nadir Shah took counsel from Hafiz's book when he was meditating an expedition against Tauris, and opened it at the following verse: “Irak and Fars thou hast conquered with thy songs, oh Hafiz; now it is the turn of Baghdad and the appointed hour of Tabriz.” Nadir Shah took this as an encouragement to fresh conquest, and went on his way rejoicing.

It is not only as a maker of exquisite verse but also as a philosopher that Hafiz has gained so wide an esteem in the East. No European who reads his Divan but will be taken captive by the delicious music of his songs, the delicate rhythms, the beat of the refrain, and the charming imagery. Some of them are instinct with the very spirit of youth and love and joy, some have a nobler humanity and cry out across the ages with a voice pitifully like our own; and yet few of us will turn to Hafiz for wisdom and comfort, or choose him as a guide. It is the interminable, the hopeless mysticism, the playing with words that say one thing and mean something totally different, the vagueness of a philosophy that dares not speak out, which repels the European just as much as it attracts the Oriental mind. “Give us a working theory,” we demand. “Build us imaginary mansions where our souls, fugitives from the actual, may dream themselves away”—that, it seems to me, is what the Persian asks of his teacher.