Muntaḫab al-tavārīḫ - The Muntakhabu-’rukh, Volume 3

This is the poetical name of the Khānzamān. As the events of his life are well known, not only from this selection, but from every history of Hindūstān, any further account of him would be merely a repetition. He wrote these verses:—

“Slender as a hair is thy waist,
No wider than the end of that hair is thy mouth.”

When he published abroad the ode which begins thus, many of ²³⁹ the poets of that province^331a wrote odes to compete with it. One began as follows:—

“I said, ‘Thy mouth is no more substantial than an idea,’
She said, ‘The idea that thou hast formed is correct.’

I composed the following:—

“Thy mouth is the fountain of Khiẓr,^331b
Thy tongue is a fish in that fountain.”

In these days I prefer to repent sincerely of such poetry and versification, which I published freely in the days of my ignorance, but which now appear to me to be a vain accomplishment.

The following verses are by the Khānzamān:—

“Cease, my heart, from weeping and wailing continually
like a bell,
Make, my heart, to none complaint of the cruelty of thy
love.”

“O breeze, in the court of my love, in that language which
thou knowest
Make my supplication before her, as thou canst.”

“I have a charmer whose face is like the rose, and like
hyacinths her hair,
Her rippling locks of hyacinth fall over rose-petals.”

“My love, the darling of no other is like thee,
No other lover is distracted like me.”

“O infidel boy,³³² we drink no cup at thy hands
We are drunk from another cup, with the wine of
‘Am I not your Lord?’”^332a

The Khānzamān's brother, Bahādur Khān,³³³ also had some poetic genius, and wrote an ode. which is reproduced below on ²⁴⁰ the theme of that ode of Mullā Āsafi's which begins:—

“The night of grief has much embittered by lot.
Where is the morning? For rust has settled on my
mirror.”

Bahādur Khān's ode.^333a

“The wanton, cruel charmer has taken a stone in his hand,
As though he would attack me, the weary one.
My moon-faced darling sits on the throne of beauty,
He is a king, seated on his throne.
Without thee, Bahādur, they will not cease from their
wailing and their wine-bibbing
For they have taken from thee the flute of grief.”

In accordance with the saying, “the words of kings are the kings of words” this appears to be a sufficiency of the poetry of these two^333b

He was a qāẓī^334a and a theologian of cheerful disposition. He came to India and died, having acquired honour by performing the pilgrimage of Islām. In prosody, and rhyming, and the composition of enigmas he was unrivalled. The following quatrain is by him:—

“Sairī, take up thy abode in the sanctuary of the soul and
the heart,
Withdraw thy sight from this form compounded of water
and earth;
Everything, save the knowledge of God, is naught,
Forsake everything, and acquire this knowledge.”

These verses also are by him:—

“She does not close that narcissus-like eye on account of
ophthalmia,
²⁴¹ She shuts the door of mercy on grief-stricken lovers.”

“Preacher, miscall me not for my devotion to my idol,
For God's sake torment me no more.”

He is Mīrzā Beg, brother's son to Khẉāja Amīnā,^334c who was known as Khẉāja Jahān. He has written a dīvān. The following verses are the fruit of his brilliant intellect:—

“Soften with a smile the poison of thy angry eye.
As bitter almonds are made sweet by the addition of salt.”

“My wandering heart passed by the street of calamity,
It is strange that my heart wandered without thee.³³⁵ Its
action was strange.”

“Sipihrī, take, like the tulip, a cup in the king's round,^335a
Now that the heart has blossomed and the rose-garden
smells sweet.”
“The king of exalted rank, Humāyūn, the dust of whose door
In dignity far excels the heavens.”

He was a servant of Bairam Khān.^335c and the Khān sent by his hand a sum of seven thousand rupees as an offering to the shrine of his holiness the Imām Riẓā^335d (on whom be blessings and praise! Having spent all this money he was there called to account by Shāh Ṭahmāsp and in the year H. 974 (A.D. 1566-67) was released from torture by death). These couplets are by him:—

“When my sallow countenance appeared in the mirror,
The mirror, from the reflection of my face, became an
autumn leaf.”

“My narrow breast, in which lodges grief for the absence of
my love,
May yet be so situated that joy will leave in it no room for
my soul.”

He chose his poetical name from the profession of his father, who was an arrow-maker. He grew up in the service of Mīrzā Azīz Kūka^336a and, since he has been addicted to poetry from the age of ten, he has become thoroughly versed in it, and is famous throughout the world. In reply to that ode by Ummīdī the mystic,^336b which begins,

“Thou art the king of the kingdom of beauty,
We are beggars enjoying the spectacle,”

he was one day reciting an ode of his own before the court. When he came to the hemistich,

“I am a pure Sunnī and come from Bukhārā,”

Lashkar Khān,^336c the paymaster in chief, who was a Khurāsānī suspected of heresy, though he did not openly profess it,^336d said, “Then, Mullā, there is also such a thing as an impure Sunnī?” Mirzā ‘Azīz Kūka said on the spur of the moment, “You, for example.”

Qāsim Arsalān has the following quatrain referring to Sahmī.

“Sahmī, Ṭarīqī,³³⁷ and Farīdūn^337a are thieves,
They are thieves like the cat, the jackal, and the monkey,
Take care not to recite your poetry before them
For these two or three poets will steal the lines from you.”

The following are some lines from Sahmī's ode written in answer to one by^337b Ummīdī:—

“The thought of thy mole has ever had its place in my heart, ²⁴³
I did not mention this scar to thee, but it remained on my
heart.
I sowed the seed of hope in the field of love,
But obtained no crop save a crop of despair,
When thou sawest in the mirror the reflection of thy cruel
face
The mirror melted before it from shame.”

“This is not the new moon that has risen to the highest
point of the heavens,
It is a sword hung in the air for the purpose of slaying
me.”^337c

“The new moon of the ‘Īd was likened to the arch of her
eyebrow.

If the simile were just there would be ever another³³⁸ new
moon at her side.”
“Her mouth is like the end of a hair in its delicate propor-
tions, but see
How the sword of her tongue in speech splits the hair.”^338a

244 “Thou camest before me in order to vex my wounded heart,
What evil have I done that thou hast thus come before
me?”

His name was Bahrām. He was a devotee who believed that he had attained the stage of annihilation.^338c He was one of the disciples of Shaikh Ḥājī Muḥammad Khabūshānī (may his tomb be hallowed!), and was in some measure mysteriously attracted towards God.^338d He constantly traversed the streets of Āgra with a few pupils, giving water to the people of God, and while he was thus employed his tongue would be uttering refreshing verses. One of the sons of his religious guide came to India, and to him he gave all that he possessed, and would have given more, had it been possible, and he then set forth on foot, alone and destitute, for Sarandīb,³³⁹ and on the way to Ceylon the torrent of annihilation swept away the chattels of his existence, and in that infidel land some person, guided by a sign from the prophet (the blessing and peace of God be upon him!) appeared, no one knew whence, and arranged for the obsequies of Saqqā, (may God water his grave!).

He collected several dīvāns of his own poems, and whenever he was overcome by religious ecstasy he would wash the ink from the pages of the dīvāns, one by one, but the remains of his poems form a large dīvān. The following verses are part of the outcome of his clear and sparkling intellect:—

“I am thrown into bewilderment each time I regard the mole
on His cheek,
I distractedly encompass that spot like the leg of a pair of
compasses tracing a circle around its centre.
I, distraught as I am, have withdrawn my gaze from fair
creatures for this reason
That I have in the nest of my heart a Friend of my soul
like Thee.”

“I have broken the foundations of austerity that I might
see what would come to pass,
I have sat in the market-place of ignominy, that I might
see what would come to pass.”

“I see my poor mad heart distracted with the love of Thy
face,
I see it encompassed on every side with the chains of Thy
locks.”

“This day from weeping am I plunged in my heart's blood,
Ah, heart! cause not my head to burst this day with
weeping.”

“The love of that beloved one with garments like the rose
has again grasped me by the collar,
Ah, now, at last, it has rent my garment from collar to
skirt.”³⁴⁰

245 He was the grandson of the famous Khwāja Kalān Beg.^340b This quatrain is by him.

“Alas, that the season of the rose has passed so quickly,
Alas, that it has passed in the twinkling of an eye!
Without thy eyes and the down on thy cheek the violet
and the hyacinth
Pass their days in blindness and in mourning.”^340c

He died in Āgra in the year H. 978 (A.D. 1570-71).

His name is Sharīf. He was for some time a roster-keeper, and now holds some appointment in Bengal under Sharīf Āmalī. He at first assumed Faiẓī as his poetical name, but when Shaikh Faiẓī submitted a complaint to the emperor on the subject he abandoned his pretensions, and chose Sarmadī as his poetical name. He has some poetic genius. The following verses are by him.

“Since the sword of the coquetries of that haughty
beauty has been raised,
Spectators from afar have stretched out a hundred necks
to receive its blow.”

“When thou camest to my house with the fumes of wine
in thy head and roses under thy arm
The very dust of this house of grief put forth blossoms
to see the sight of thy arrival.”

“Since in contempt I set my foot upon both worlds
Neither joy nor sorrow has had any power over my
heart.”

He is an ‘Arab, and his father Shaikh Ibrāhīm was a learned theologian whom the Shī‘ahs, after their mode of belief, regarded as an infallible religious guide. He settled in Mashhad, and Sāqī was born there. Sāqī has acquired some learning, and is ²⁴⁶ of a cheerful disposition and eloquent. He came from the Dakan to Hindūstān, and is now in Bengal. The following verses are by him:—

“From my soul, as I weep, arises a sigh of grief,
Even as smoke arises when water is thrown on fire.”

“I grieve not for the cruelty of my love
Lest my grief should become a cause of joy to others.”

“When she passes by me in wrath the tears flow from my
eyes,
“Just as tears flow from eyes dazzled by the sun's rays.”

“My heart flutters lest thou should have come to it in thy
sleep.
Whenever there comes before me any person heavy with
sleep.”

An ode.

“In my desire for thy eyelashes each breath loads my heart
with blood,
In order that it may bring me once more into thy hand.
My heart obtained a glance from thee which made my soul
thy prey. Aye,
An arrow which has struck the mark steadies the aim.
My heart is, as ever, ardent with love; thou art, as ever,
indifferent.
Sāqī, describe to her thy pain, before she publishes it
abroad.”

His name is Sayyid Shāh, and he has already been mentioned. He comes of the Sayyids of the Garmsīr^342a who settled in Kālpī. He is of a cheerful disposition and is pleasant in conversation and is to some extent imbued with religious mysticism. He is the disciple of Shaikh Salīm Cishti. He was for some time in the emperor's service, but it was his fate to leave it, and he has ²⁴⁷ since spent his time in the service of various Amīrs. He is now in Kābul with Qilīj Muḥammad Khān. I quote the following few couplets of his:—

“I am in the first pangs of love, and my heart is disquieted,
Like a child who trembles as he wakes from sleep.”

“Since that stately cypress-like beauty made for herself a
necklace of roses,
I envy the roses, and the roses envy her shift.”

“From my strayed heart the breeze obtained no news of
what had happened,
Although thy two locks spread their tresses to the wind.”³⁴³

“Reverence forbids me to set foot in my house,
Since the whole house has been filled with the effulgence
of thy face.”

“I utter not a word of the secrets of thy favours and thy
chiding,
No sound arises from him who has been killed in sub-
mission to thee.”

“Although there remains to nobody in the reign of the
king of the world
Anything but a draught of water and a patched garment,
Yet thanks a hundredfold are due to God that poverty
has become universal,
That there remains no envy among the people.”

“I wrote an ode in thy honour, lord of generosity,
Which was a faithful index of the volume of thy virtues
and perfections,
But the generosity which thou showedst to me in return
for it was so slight,
That my hope of benefiting by thy wealth was destroyed.
Thy generosity was not an equivalent for my poetry,
²⁴⁸ Keep, then, thy generosity, and return my poetry.”

“God forbid that I should have a heart that never ex-
periences pain,
An arrow is better in the breast than a dead heart.”

He has been mentioned in the historical record of the reign. He was a man of cheerful disposition and had good taste in poetry. I reproduce these few couplets of his:—

“My soul, to keep company with strangers is not good,
It is not good to associate with every beloved one and to
leave one friendless.
It is pleasant sometimes to torment a lover, but kindness
is also pleasant sometimes,
To sit ever on the throne of scorn is not good.
Sit in the corner of separation, happy in the hope of
re-union.
To despair of the good fortune of seeing³⁴⁵ the beloved one
again is not good.”

“Beloved, I have been alone, and separated from thee.
I have been, for a purpose, a prisoner in the bonds of
separation.
In every place have I read the story of thy love so often
That on this account I am become a by-word in the
world.”

“My heart suffers grief of a thousand descriptions on her
account,
If my grief kills me not what other boon shall I obtain
from her?

He comes from a village called Kokūwāl^345b in the Panjāb. ²⁴⁹ His father belongs to the Mājīs,^345c a large and well-known tribe, and he used to say that his mother was a Sayyid by race. Although he is not of noble blood he has a disposition sufficiently noble, and leads a well-regulated life. He studied under his father, Maulānā Yaḥyā, who wrote an ode with this opening couplet:—

“From the rain of Thy favour, O merciful Providence,
There remain, from each drop, in the heart of the wise a
hundred rivers of precious secrets.”

Shīrī had great facility in writing verse, and once boasted that he had composed thirty odes in one night, but God knows whether this was true or not. One day he was reading in an assembly a fragment from his dīvān, which contained this hemistich,

“I have thrown four volumes of verse into the river Cināb.”

The late Maulānā Ilāhdād of Amroha³⁴⁶ at once said, “What if you had thrown this spill^346a of paper after them?”

Shīrī possessed, to some extent, unworldliness, sympathy, and the ascetic spirit, and has written verses in this vein, for example,

“I am lord of the table of poverty, and never
Will my spirit allow me to beg from my friend.
To borrow from Hindūs at four hundred per cent
Is better than receiving gifts from these Musalmāns.”

No poet among his contemporaries has written better pessimistic poetry^346b than he has. This is a specimen of such verses:—

“O, ye dead, rejoice that ye are at rest,
For pleasure has departed from our midst!
O, ye who are to follow us, read the fātiḥa^346c
To offer thanks that you were not living in our time!”

In the composition of elaborate odes and epigrams he certainly excelled all the poets of his time, and silenced them by making such felicity of diction as they possessed seem as naught beside ²⁵⁰ his own. The following fragment justly |describes his abilities in this line.

“If thou ask me of the poetry of Shīrī
I would say, if justice is to be done,

That not all the verses that poets write pass as current
coin
Just as nobody's wine is all clear.
Shīrī, praise not the base,
For praise befits the noble.³⁴⁷
Shīrī's ghazals and maṯnavīs are mere rubbish,
And this is intended neither for praise nor for blame,
But the fame of his odes and epigrams
Has reached the uttermost parts of the earth.”^347a

The few verses quoted below are the production of his brilliant wit:—

“My heart is so enamoured of the beauty of Salmā^347b
That it wanders abroad with her heart in search of
consolation.
The remembrance of another by that heart in which thou
dwellest
Is equivalent to the worship of ‘Uzzā^347c in the Ka‘bah.^347d
The beloved has so entirely surrounded herself with an
array of coquetry,
That even desire found no way of access to her in that
dense crowd.”

“Bid the caravan move faster, that Egypt
May no longer send back to us the cries of Zulaikhā^347e
grieving for our absence.”

“I have bound my letter to thee with a white thread to
signify
That in my separation from thee no blood remains in the
veins of my soul.”

“Deprived of thy face my existence is a sea of pain and
grief,
My ribs are the waves of that sea.”

“She comes to slay me, with the sword of cruelty in her
hand.
Whatever men relate of injustice is committed by that
cruel one.

251 “In the abundance of its hopefulness the heart believes that
a messenger comes from Shīrīn
To the unfortunate Farhād³⁴⁸ even though it be Parvīz
himself that comes.”

“Wherefore, O tear, dost thou traverse my eye
When I bid farewell to my dear?
Where wert thou then, that thou now obscurest my sight?
O Zephyr, my beloved has entirely filled the mould of my
desire,
I am thy devoted servant, but thou wanderest overmuch in
her street.”

The following few couplets are from an ode of question and answer^348a by him:—

“I said, ‘O heart, what is the cause of this change in the
condition of the world?’
My heart replied, ‘Silence, the brain of heaven is thrown
into confusion.’

I said, ‘From the well of hope the water of desire is not to
be had.’
It replied ‘The well-rope of hope was not sufficiently long.’³⁴⁹
I said, ‘If there is any rest anywhere, tell me where it may
be found?
It replied, ‘In sleep, they say, the sleep of death.’
I said, ‘Can anyone spend his life in joy?’
It said ‘This is mere speech, which never comes to pass.’
I said ‘Why is the brow of the beloved one furrowed with
a frown?’
It said, ‘It is ill to contend with one ill-disposed.’
I said, ‘The mirror of wisdom is covered with rust.’
It said, ‘Where is the burnisher, generosity, that it may
once more receive a polish?’
I said, ‘The eloquent are the ornament of the assembly.’ ²⁵²
It said, ‘Thou canst not say these things to the wealthy.’
I said, ‘Alas for these men, who are far from the truth!’
It said, ‘Let justice be done on this deceitful race, which
follows injustice.’
I said, ‘I have a detailed complaint to make against my
fate.’
It said, ‘To the King thou must relate it succinctly.’
I said, ‘To Akbar, who resembles Jamshīd in glory and
Sulaimān in wisdom?’
It said, ‘Yes, the King of high destiny who in dignity
resembles the sun.’
I said, ‘That personality which is second only to the
prophet in honour?’
It said, ‘Yes to that creature of God who surpasses all in
beneficence.’
I said, ‘By race and descent the crown and the throne are
justly his.’
It said, ‘His favour and liberality are the protection of his
kingdom and his people.’

The following two couplets are from an ode which he wrote on the utility of the elephant:—

“How sweetly pass those nights in which, praying inces-
santly for the safety of the King's elephant,
I read the chapter ‘night’³⁵⁰ by the margin of the river
Biyāh;
On the fair ones of Kūkūwāl with the gait of an elephant^350a
and the eyes of gazelles
I think every moment, and heave sighs from my bosom.”

The following is the opening couplet of an ode in which he enumerates six things as being necessary.

“O thou who holdest the world in the grasp of thy wisdom
by the force of thy sword and thy arrow,
Crowned monarch of the throne and of fate,
Who conquerest the world by means of thy elephants and
thy horses,
Thy crown and thy throne, thy sword and thy arrow are
the sun, the moon, the lightning, and the meteor,
A hundred writers^350b would be unable to reckon the number
of thy elephants and horses.”

As his dīvān is exceedingly well known I refrain from quoting any more of his verses.

At the time when he was employed on the translation of the Mahābhārata^350c he said, “These prolix fables resemble the dreams of a man in a fever.”

Mullā Shīrī's death occurred in the hilly country of the Yūsufzais, in the year H. 994 (A.D. 1586) as has been already mentioned.³⁵¹

He came recently to India, and is in the service of the Khān-khānān, son of Bairam Khān.^351b He has good taste. The following verses are by him:—^351c

“My nightly lamentations are still of some effect.
My broken bow has still an arrow which will reach its
mark.
My heart is provoked by her absence; show me some
mercy, O fate!
For my hand is hampered in combat by my having a
mountain's weight tied to my waist.
Scatter roses on the skirts of my friends, for he who is
wounded to the heart by her absence
Has, on the point of each eyelash, a hundred drops^351d from
his liver.”

“O God! Send me from heaven a market for my wares,
I am selling my heart for a sight of my love; send me a
buyer.”

“My wares are anguish, not joy; why dost thou ask the
price?
Well I know that thou wilt not buy, and I will not sell.”

“When will the deliciousness of love's grief be forgotten?
I have sprinkled that salt on the marrow of my bones.”

He is Saif-ul-Mulūk the physician.³⁵² One day when he came to treat a sick man Mīr Sayyid Muḥammad the cloth-weaver, who has the poetical name of Fikrī,^352a and is well known under the nickname of Mīr Rubā‘ī, was employed with the patient. The Mīr said of Shujā‘ī,

“A sharp sword^352b is his worship, Maulavī Saif-ul-Mulūk,
Who has introduced a new fashion in the practice of medi-
cine.
²⁵⁴ Yesterday Death said, when he had come to take the life of
a sick man,
‘Everywhere I go he has been called in first.’”

The Maulānā (Saif-ul-Mulūk) composed the following ‘increased’ quatrain^352c on the incontinence and gluttony of the Mīr (Sayyid Muḥammad),

“O Mīr, how can five gallons^352d of thick broth be contained—
in one debilitated stomach?
Si autem contineantur, quomodo continebit se penis tuus—ab
intromissione primâ?^352e

A tablet which will not contain a quatrain—written in the
smallest writing³⁵³
Will surely not contain a long ode—written in large text.”^353a

The following verses are the production of the Maulānā's almost magical genius:—

“Distracted with love, the hair of thy head is dishevelled,
May I become a sacrifice for thy head, for thou hast traffic
with lovers.”

“A hair has fallen from my love's locks across her cheek,
Or is it perchance the thread of my soul lying across the
fire?”

“Better that I should be buried in the earth than that, for
the sake of base desires,
I should walk the earth to seek favours from worldlings.”

He is a student and practises book-keeping. The following verses are by him:—

“O thou who, for fear of being separated from thy love, art
in the agony of death,
I give thee good news, for she, whose breath is like that of
Masīḥ,^353c is coming, nay, is come.”

“The desire of seeing thee brings me, each moment, from my
house;
“Desire has seized me by the collar, and draws me to thee.

255 My great Preserver³⁵⁴ is harsh to me in a thousand ways,
But how shall He bring the poor Shu‘ūrī into thy pres-
ence?”

“Love has entered, and seized the vein of my soul,
The bewilderment of seeing thee has made my tongue
mute.”

“Her wavy lock has fallen on her moon-like cheek,
A horse-shoe has been put into the fire for thee.”^354a

“Thou didst promise to sow the seed of faithfulness.
What is faithfulness? To keep one's promises.”

“The double chin^354b of that beauty with eyebrows like the
new moon
Is the reflection of the new moon in clear water.”

“Nay, for when the sun rose in the heavens,
The moon appeared beneath his rays.”

He is too honourable to be placed among the poets and reckoned along with the poets of this age. So to place him is a disgrace to him and a disgrace to me. He is mentioned as a Mullā of good understanding, of pleasant speech, and full of apposite learning. After many vicissitudes he came to India, and having devoted his attention to the successions³⁵⁵ of self-styled saints in this country, set most of them by the ears. By the aid of the divine guidance he was led to make a pilgrimage to the sacred house of God,^355a and the other holy places,^355b and in the year H. 978 (A.D. 1570-71) he returned and set out for his native country, but Mīrzā Muḥammad Hakīm^355c desired him to sojourn in Kābul and began to study under him. At present he is living, honoured and respected, in ²⁵⁶ Transoxiana, where he is engaged in teaching and lecturing. He has good taste in poetry and a sublime imagination. He has written a dīvān. These verses are by him:—

“My heart is lost and nobody can tell me whither it is gone,
Thy ruby lip is laughing, my suspicion rests on thee.”

“There is no resting place but thy door for my wandering
heart;
I said I would stray from thy door, but my heart would not
depart.”

“Thou hast returned like the sun from thy journey, O thou
with a face like the moon!
Thou wentest away beautiful, and hast returned most
beautiful.”

“O thou with a face like the rose, I desire not to see thee
like the snuff of a candle, in every assembly,
I desire not to see thee inclining, like the rose-branch, in
every direction.”

“My love's mind is like a mirror set before me,
In it I see reflected whatever is in my heart”

“The pain of love, which I kept concealed from thee in my
heart and soul,
Has become manifest from my face, howmuchsoever I
tried to conceal it.”

“That stately cypress³⁵⁶ which I cherished in those eyes of
hers which shed tears of blood
I now see in my own eyes, with all its rubbish and splin-
ters.”

“Come, my tears, what do you hope to gain by thus raining
down from my moist eyes.”
You have disgraced me before the world: what more do you
require?”

He was of the Caghatāī tribe. He lived a very unrestrained and licentious life. He had great skill in poetry. The following verses are by him:—

257 “That my heart loves thee thou alone knowest.
I have told this secret to none, God knows.”

“Come unveiled into my poor house
For there is none in my house save grief for thee.”

“Thou hast not been a lover, thou hast not suffered the
grief of separation;
How should one unfold to thee the tale of separation's
woe?”

“Thou didst sit nowhere, but the jealous watcher sat with
thee,
Save when thou didst take thy place in my heart and he
remained without.”

“Last night to save my life, I took refuge from the hard-
ships of separation in thoughts of thee.
Thy image remained in my soul, else had I died.”

“Alas, that I am so forgotten by that cruel one
That her eye has never fallen upon me, even in thought!”

“With thy image in my mind's eye I say, ‘This is re-
union.’
I carnestly desire reunion with thee, all I have is imagina-
tion.”

“Weakness has overpowered me, and my heart is weary
with weeping.
Who will now inform her of my condition?
What need is there that I should explain my condition to
her?
For my heart, if it truly burns, will have some effect on
her.”

“Long eyelashes cause calamities
And when the white of the lover's eye becomes red they
shed blood.”

His death occurred at Āgra in the year H. 973 (A.D. 1565-66) or H. 972 (A.D. 1564-65) and the words ‘Ṣabūḥī the wine-bibber’³⁵⁸ give the date of it.

He came from Hirāt and has good taste both in poetry and in prose composition. He is somewhat studious and writes a good hand. He was for some time employed as one of the secretaries, and then returned to his native land. He wrote the following couplet:—

“In the night of separation from thee, in my eye-sockets
The blood from my liver was so congealed that sleep could
not enter them.”

This was written in imitation of the following couplet of Amīr Khusrav's:—

“I fenced my eyes in with a thorn-hedge of eyelashes
In order that neither thy image might leave them nor
sleep find entrance.”

The following are other verses by Ṣāliḥī:—

“With my two eyes, red with weeping during the grief of
the night of separation,
What shall I do, for these will be the roses of the day
when we meet?
I have neither desire nor strength to associate with the
rose, that I should roam in the rose-garden,
And the scent of the roses suggests to me only unfaithful-
[ness^358b
Like the dogs I have taken my place at thy threshold
In order that my rival may not enter in the guise of a
beggar.”^358c

“Since my head was severed by that dagger of cruelty
It remains, weltering in blood, in one place, and my sad
heart in another.
Love, whether in separation or in union, is a source of
pain;
Khusrav bewails his love in one place and Farhād³⁵⁹ his
in another.”

He was born in Qandahār but was a Hirātī by origin. He was for some time in Hindūstān and died. The following verses are his:—

“So many wounds has my body received from thy sword
That on whichever side I fall my heart falls to the
ground.”

“The wounded heart pays no heed to the body,
The martyr of love has no need of a shroud.
Since I have been created a man of straitened means
Why have I no share in that mouth?^359b
Of my body little is left but a formless idea, and that too,
When closely regarded, is seen to be no more than my
shirt.”

“On the day on which each man's lot was decreed to him
by fate,
The lot of others was joy, while mine was sorrow.
O my heart! Tell me not that that moonlike beauty
comes in answer to my weeping;
So many thousands of lamentations have I uttered, and
when did she come?”

A quatrain.

“The structure of cruelty was founded by thee,
The structure of my life was scattered to the winds by
thee.
Thou art a treasure of elegance, yet never
Has my ruined habitation been made prosperous by thee.”

260 He is Shaikh Ya‘qūb of Kashmīr, a small portion of whose perfections has already been described by the author's halting pen. He is an epitome of all accomplishments and therefore if his praises be repeated (a pleasant repetition), what fault can be found? In spite of his having written standard works on the mysticism of the Ṣūfīs and many other branches of knowledge his genius was highly adapted to the composition of eloquent poetry. The following couplets are a small portion of the fruit of his wonderful meditations:—

“In the morning that beauty with a face like the moon
threw a veil over her face,
It was strange to see the sun veiled before evening fell.”

“Ask not of the merits of tutty, but ask for the dust of her
door,
Ask of its virtues from discerning men.”

In his latter days he wished to compose a commentary on the Qur'ān like the Great Commentary^360a and he had already written some of it roughly when suddenly death's decree reached him, and the unavoidable summons of God^360b was delivered to him in his well-loved native land, as has been said, and he died.

He was for some time in Gujarāt with Khẉāja Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad, and then came to Lāhor and lived as a religious mendicant. When Shaikh Faiẓī was appointed to the Dakan he went with him, and thence journeyed to the next world. He has written a dīvān and in long and short odes was a master of style. The following couplets are by him:—

“I am debarred from traversing the road to the Ka‘bah,
else would I have sent there,
The sole of a foot glad to endure the torment of collect-
ing its acacia thorns.”

“My rose-seller who wishes to bring her roses to market
Must first acquire strength to withstand the impetuous
throng of buyers.”

“If thou wishest to burn me light up the fire of thy cheek,
And so shall a light arise from my ashes till the day of ²⁶¹
resurrection.”

He was taken prisoner on the day on which the Khānzamān was slain, and though he escaped execution he did not escape death.^361b His poetry is mediocre. These few verses are from his pen:—

“I have surrendered my soul and my heart, being no longer
able to bear the pain of separation from her,

What a pain is this, which has no remedy save the sur-
rendering of one's soul!
When the manifest fever of my love is not visible to her,
How shall I inform her of my secret wounds?
When that moon-like beauty walks abroad in the night in
vesture of the hue of the night
The brightness of dawn may be seen where her dress
opens at the neck.”

“I would that her breast could be cleft by my dagger
That my pure heart might see whether her heart is pure.”

“Her waist has entranced the hearts of men,
Has completely made away with the hearts of men.”

He obtained from the emperor the title of ‘Aqil (‘the sagacious’). He is crazy about statuary. For some time he has laid it upon himself as a duty to eat nothing before he has sent five or six dishes of meat to be thrown into a river, a fountain, or a pond as an offering to Khiẓr (on him be peace). He used to hand these dishes to Qāsim, a native of India (who was a poet and the son of an elephant driver, and also a low-minded fellow), and Qāsim used to go out and invite qalandars^362a and other rascals to eat the food, and when (on his return) Ṣāliḥ would say, ²⁶² ‘Ha, did you see the Khẉāja?’ the impudent rogue would reply, “Yes, his holiness the Khẉāja deigned to eat the food with much relish, and sent you his blessing,” and would fabricate lying stories of this sort, which the madman believed. He had, however, some poetic genius, and to him might have been applied the saying:—

“Beautiful poetry emanates from the cross-grained Ḥaidar
Kalaj
Just as roses spring from a midden.”

Ṣāliḥ wrote the following couplet:—

“Since the desire of her locks has fettered my feet,
My only way out of this bargain³⁶³ is to surrender my
life.”

Ṣāliḥ was for some time a favoured and honoured courtier, then fell into disgrace and went to Kābul. He returned thence and was appointed to the trusteeship of the light-diffusing shrine of the Sulṭān of Shaikhs^363a (may God hallow his soul!), but did not accept the appointment, and, having obtained leave to return to Kābul, departed.

He is Mullā ‘Alī the Muḥaddiṯ,^363b brother of the well-known Mullā Ṣādiq. He acquired his learning in the Sayings in Arabia, and was extremely pious and temperate. He came twice to India, and in the year H. 981 (A.D. 1573-74) entered the protection of God's mercy, when the famous Mullā ‘Ālim of Kābul^363c made this chronogram on his death.

“Alas! for suddenly Mullā ‘Alī
Has been snatched from our midst by misfortune's victory.
To ascertain the year of his death remember that the date
of the year which followed it
Is contained in the words ‘Mullā ‘Alī the Muḥaddiṯ is
dead.’”³⁶⁴

His sprightly genius, following the dictates of his taste, would sometimes employ itself in the composition of verses. (The ²⁶³ following are some of his verses.)

“My earthy body is so withered away from the scorching
brand of separation
That it escapes from my garments like dust, if I shake
the skirt of my robe.”

“Thy stately form is a plant in the garden of my soul,
The plant of thy stature is more ethereal than my
thoughts.”

“I have plunged the pupil of my eye into water
That it may not for a moment think of sleep.”

“Since I have no honour among men,
I seek to flee from men as my tears flow from my eyes.”^364a

“Since I have cast my heart into the bonds of the tresses
of moonlike beauties
I have woven for myself a net of calamity.”

He was a lewd old man and a buffoon^365a and was popular among most of the poets about the court by the mere force of his impudence.

He at last had the honour of performing the holy pilgrimage (to Makkah), and died there. The following verses are by him:—

“What business have lovers other than giving up their lives?
Since I fear not death what else should I fear?”

“From the toilsome pain of separation nobody has any life
left.”
If this is separation nobody has any life left.”

“In this land I have given my heart to a most cruel enslaver.
I have fallen into the snare of the locks of one with a face
like a fairy.”

“I am the faithful dog of him whose foot does not stray ²⁶⁴
beyond the skirts of his own power,
Who imposes obligations on none, and is under obligation to
none.”

“We saw the graceful cypress-like figure of that fair one
depart,
Although no one has seen a soul depart.”

“Thou saidst, ‘Do not hover around me, or I will disgrace
and slay thee.’
Still do I hover around thee. Depart not from thy word.”

“When her two cheeks come into my mind in the hours of
sleep,
All night long I see the moon and the sun in my dreams.
Remembering that thou wert to come, although thou
comest not,
Tranquillity leaves my soul, and distraction enters my
heart.”

“The pain of love is increased, and no sympathy remains in
the world,
Majnūn was both afflicted and sympathetic, but he did not
remain in the world.”

“From this world, as a mistress, I have wholly cut myself off.
That I might quarrel with nobody for such a thing as a
world.”

“It is impossible to live without thee for a moment in the
world,
For thou art my soul, and nobody can live without a soul.”

“Nobody spoke, nor asked what a stage this must have been
In which Khiẓr was the last of the water-carriers of the
caravan.”

“The army of grief for thy absence has captured the citadel
of my heart,

The scars which are visible on my heart are the hosts³⁶⁷ of
the foe.”

He has now dwelt in Kashmīr for nearly eight years. At first he was a religious mendicant and then he elected to become an official, and entered the emperor's service. From Kashmīr he was sent as envoy to the ruler of Little Tibat, ‘Alī Rāī,^367b and on his return presented to Shaikh Abū-'l-Faẓl a treatise which he had written on the wonders of that land, which Abū-'l-Faẓl embodied in the Akbarnāma. He is a very sympathetic man, and his taste, both in poetry and in prose, is correct. He wrote the following quatrain:—

“Thou givest me to drink of the poison of thy absence, asking
me what has happened,
Thou sheddest my blood and shakest me from thee, asking
me what has happened,
O thou who art ignorant of what the sword of thy absence
inflicts on me,
Wring my dust, that thou mayst know what has happened
to me.”

Another quatrain.

“Thou readest not the story of my grief, and it waxes old,
Thou knowest not my disappointment, and it waxes old,
Let not thy coming be delayed, for as for this wound of
separation,
I fear that thou wilt linger, and it will wax old.”

Another quatrain.

“One day I, weary with travelling along the road of the stages
of the heart,
Turned its dust into mire with water from blisters on the
foot of search.
I spend my life on this road in order that, in answer to
my supplication,
²⁶⁶ Soul may meet soul, and heart heart.”

Other verses.

“Seek after enjoyment, for this virgin of life, sitting in the
bridal chamber,
Like a rose bursting forth from the bud casts her mother
aside.
Like the petals of a rose scattered by the spring breeze
We go, with dust on our heads in the grief of our hearts.”

“I am pleased with the folk of this world, for I have learnt
from their fellowship
Not to give up my corner of solitude for the world.”

He is a penman who writes the nasta‘līq hand well and is of moderately studious habits. His business was that of a bookseller ^368a in Agra.

The following couplets are by him:—

“Cupbearer,³⁶⁹ how long can the grief of this world be borne?
Bring wine, that I may banish grief from my heart.”

“Every moment she afflicts my heart, that she may make it
weary of her.
When will my heart weary of her, however much she
afflicts it?”

“I wish for no companion but thee, my darling,
I desire thee, and there is none in the world that I desire
beside thee.”

“If, when I have suffered a thousand griefs, she listens to a
word from me,
She hears but the speech of a self-seeker, and straightway
forgets it.”
“She is enraged if I speak to her but a word of my sad state;
How strange is this, that I cannot speak of my sad state to
her!”

A quatrain. ²⁶⁷

“The devotee boasts of his virtue and piety,
The lover expends the cash of his life for his love;
Each lives in hope of a glance from the eye of his Friend,
Each wonders towards whom the Friend will cast that
glance.”

Another quatrain.

“Summon contentment, if thou art wise,
Thou mayst thus, perchance, slay the dog of base desire.
See that neither water nor broth be too plentiful. Drain
not the cup,
For it will rebuke thee in a hundred draughts of iced water
and acid.”

He is the son of Mullā Darvīsh of Fatḥpūr, and his uncle, Mullā Ṣāliḥ, is now the teacher appointed to the monastery at Fatḥpūr. Ṭiflī in his thirteenth year was reading the Sharḥ-i-Shamsiyyah.^370a He has a most generous nature and an admirable taste in poetry. He is in the service of the eldest prince,^370b and obtained the poetic name of Ṭiflī from him. The following few couplets are from a laudatory ode which he composed in honour of the prince:—

“O King,^370c in whose just reign strife itself has become the
guardian of the world against the robbers of confusion,
The hope of thy favour is such that the very sins of sinners
protect them from the fire of hell.
²⁶⁸ Thou art he, to the war-horse of whose resolution in the day
of battle
Victory is the standard-bearer and success the fellow.
Last night the bird of glory brought the record of thy
success,
That bird the fame of whose pinions comes from the utter-
most parts of space beyond our ken.
The scribe of thy dignity has written passages of which we
hope for a translation and for which we earnestly desire a
translator.”

He also wrote the following verses:—

“If the beauty of the Idol were to display itself in the
monastery

Devotees who drag about their prayer carpets would ex-
change their rosaries for the idolator's thread.
Nobody counts the cash of both worlds offered by the buyer
In that place where the merchandise consists of wounded
hearts.”

“I am he who has grown to love the lancet of grief.
Ointment is shamed by the wound in my breast.”

“From our manner of dealing with Islām in the day of
retribution
It is likely that infidelity will seize us by the skirt.”

“The song of love's feast this night inflamed the plectrum,
Her glances were the singers and her eyebrow the rebeck-
players this night.”

“O heart, let my lips for once be wreathed with smiles!
For to-night will be seen the splendour of love's tears of
blood.”

“I fear no reproof, for the reproaches of the jealous watcher
Are as applause to the followers of love's religion.”

“Ah! See how thy glance imperils our true faith, ²⁶⁹
Trust in thy promises is a sure way to disappointment.”³⁷¹

“Brahman, despair not of the efficacy of thy prostrations to
thy idol,
For the mark on thy forehead is the mirror of thy fate.”^371a

“How should my pain be assuaged by lint and ointment,
The bird of whose wounded heart breathes forth flame?”

The following few couplets are from a tarjī‘-band³⁷² by Ṭiflī:—

“My tears, rejoice, for this night
My heart's blood surges up in my eyes.
O reunion, plead for me, for my desire for her
Has devastated the abode of reason.
Speak not to me of delight,
For the lancet has become the companion of my wound,
It is useless to say to anybody,
‘Scatter diamond-dust in your wound but do not cry out.’”

It is marvellous that a lad of Ṭiflī's years should understand and speak Persian; much more so that he should be able to compose poetry in the language. It may be hoped that he will outstrip many of these old men who have wasted their lives.

He used to live in the Dakan, and was characterized by his unrestrained manner of life, his indifference to public opinion, and his disinclination from attending at the courts of kings. Shaikh Faiẓī used to dilate much on the praiseworthy qualities of him and of Malik Qumī, known as Malik-ul-Kalām, and these two poets wished to accompany the Shaikh to the imperial court at Lāhor, but Burhān-ul-Mulk^372b prevented them from going. It is now reported that the unruly Dakanīs, following their detestable habit of murdering foreigners,³⁷³ have, in a recent riot, put these two poor innocent men to death (may God put them to death!).

Maulānā Ẓuhūrī was a master of poetical style, and composed a dīvān. The following couplets are quoted as a memorial of ²⁷⁰ him:—

“The wine-stains cause tulips to bloom on my woollen coat,
The evening of Friday ever brings a Saturday for me.”^373a

“Ẓuhūrī, thy complaints of the beloved are out of place.
Thy destiny is at fault. What fault is that of hers?”

This Mullā of pleasant manners, cheerful nature and graceful actions used the poetical name of ‘Ārif. In argument, and at other times, he would say things fit to make his hearers die with laughter. In his common-place book he has written an essay on the commentary^373c on the Maqāṣid and has stated the proposition that the title means ‘the book of endeavour,’ which was one of the compositions of the writer, and also a commentary called the Tajdīd (‘renewal’) on the commentary^373d on the Tajdīd, and also some marginal notes on the Muṭawwal,³⁷⁴ in which he writes, “This book is copied from the book Ṭuwaḷ,^374a which is equal in length to the Muṭawwal, or even longer.” He has also written a book containing accounts of the Shaikhs of India, in which he has entered everything that he has heard from every mosque-sweeper and beggar, adding also some conjectures of his own, and he has named it Wa fawātiḥ-ul-wilāyah. When they questioned him regarding this title, saying, “The particle wa (‘and’) requires something preceding it, to be coupled with the latter clause, and what should precede, it does not appear,” he replied, “That which precedes it is here understood, and is manifest by transposition, that is to say, the title should be Fawātiḥ-ul-walāyah , with a fatḥah over the wāw of walāyah as the wāw preceding the phrase indicates, not with a kasr under the wāw of wilāyaḥ, as it is commonly read.”^374b

The Mullā was always jealous of Qāẓī Khān of Badakhshān,^374c on the ground of his having invented the sijdah^374d (‘prostration’). One day in Fatḥpūr he led the late Mīrzā Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad and the author off to his house at early dawn, with much solicitation, and, having given us an appetizing electuary, began to show us his books, talking about them from dawn till midday, while we remained hungry and were not able to get a word in. At last the Mīrzā, no longer able to endure it, asked the Mullā whether he had anything to eat. The Mullā answered, “I thought that ²⁷¹ you had eaten before you came. I have a lamb here; if you wish I will kill it now.” We rose and went home. It is impossible to recount all pranks of this nature which he played.

When he saw that Shaikh Abū'l-Faẓl, Qāẓī Khān, and others of his contemporaries from being mullās rose to the rank of amīrs of the highest grade, while he continued to draw a small stipend, he petitioned that he too might be admitted as a soldier. His request was granted, and one day, at the time when the guard turned out for the evening salute, he appeared in military guise before the emperor, girt in a grotesque fashion with a borrowed sword, and, having approached the presence from one side of the darbār, stood, and, catching his scabbard to him, said, without any introduction,³⁷⁵ “By which manṣabdār^375a shall I stand, and from what place shall I make my obeisance?”^375b The emperor was sagacious enough to penetrate his design and said, “Make your obeisance from that place in which you are now standing.” When the Mullā saw that this effort to obtain recognition had failed he wandered at large. One day, in order to show that he possessed all that became a soldier, he came to court, in the noonday heat, in dirty, greasy clothes quilted with cotton, which had been either given or lent to him by somebody, and Mīrzā ‘Azīz Kūka cracked some pleasant jests on his appearance, and the Mullā returned pleasant answers to them.

As his birthplace was Gulbahār, a village in the district of Kābul, he wrote for some time under the poetical name of Bahārī, but afterwards, having recognized that the name was unbecoming, as it called to mind the names borne by servant girls, he changed it, and called himself Rabī‘ī.³⁷⁶ The motto which he composed for his seal was, “He had a well-ordered mind.”^376a

²⁷² The following few couplets are quoted as a memorial of him:—

“That eye in which I delighted every moment flees away,
It may be that I shall place a straw from her wall upon it.”

“The glass of delight has been shattered, with whomsoever
I sat;
The bond of fellowship has snapped, with whomsoever I
bound it.
She has risen to slay me, with the sword of hatred in her
hand,
Whenever I sat in kindness with anybody for a moment.”

He has composed, some couplets in the metre of ‘The Chain of Gold’^376b and he has called his book of nonsense “The Tinkling of the Bell,” and has enumerated in it books said to be of his own composition, some of which have no existence but in his verses, and has given them imaginary names, as in the following verses:—

“Thou mayst have seen, from a copy of the Tajdīd,³⁷⁷
That a new favour has newly arrived
In which are concealed a hundred stages of the pilgrimage,^377a
And from the contents of which great enterprises^377b are mani-
fest.
The text of the Tajūd^377c is halting beside it,
Its rose-garden has lost its colour from want of water.
Its splendour, without dissimulation and without exaggera
tion,
Is perfect wisdom, the wisdom of the sunrise^377d
And of that book, the attributes of which are beyond
telling,
Dalālat-ul-‘aql^377e is the name and description.
And that pearl which has come from the ocean of generosity,
Is the Lujjat-ul-jūd fi'l-wujūd.^377f
I am the compiler of that ‘Awālim-ul-āthār,^377g
From the instructions of the knower of chronicles,

In which I have collected a hundred and twenty different
branches of learning,
Say who else can be thus described.”

In spite of all this fooling he was a good friend, tactful, accomplished, able, sympathetic, unceremonious, agreeable, acceptable, and jocular. I hope that God (He is praised and exalted!) may in His grace and benevolence have made him a partaker of eternal life in heaven.

He was for some time Ṣadr^378a under the emperor Humāyūn and his brother, Mīr ‘Abdullāh the jurist, was one of Humāyūn's intimate and specially honoured confidants. Both brothers were endued with piety, sanctity, and regularity of life.^378b

Mīr ‘Abdul Ḥayy was expert in writing the Bābarī hand, which was invented by the emperor Bābar, who sent to the honoured city of Makkah a copy of the Qur'ān written in that hand, of which no trace now remains.^378c In the memoir of Mir ‘Alā-ud-daulah³⁷⁹ it is mentioned that Mīr ‘Abdul Ḥayy devoted some attention to the study of accomplishments and that nobody had learnt to write in the difficult Bābarī style more quickly or better than he, but Mīrzā ‘Azīz Kūka wrote in the margin of the memoir that Mīr ‘Abdul Ḥayy had no knowledge of any branch of learning, and that his one accomplishment was some knowledge of the Bābarī script, with which he was very imperfectly acquainted, that he was wonderfully simple and would, apropos of nothing and without consideration, relate in social gatherings strange tales which no child would believe. As Mīr ‘Abdul Ḥayy was better known to Mīrzā ‘Azīz Kūka than to Mir ‘Alā-ud-daulah, it is beyond doubt that what the Mīrzā wrote is nearer to the truth than that which is written in the memoir, for Mīr ‘Alā-ud-daulah, has recorded much incongruous nonsense^379a in the memoir.

Mīr ‘Abdul Ḥayy has some aptitude for poetry, and wrote an answer to that fantastical quatrain which was written in the form of a square by one of the accomplished men about the court in honour of Muḥammad Hindāl Mīrzā, and is so well known that it is the first thing that children are set to learn. The quatrain is as follows:—

“O thou, before whose court a hundred Rustams^379b have cast ²⁷⁴
down their crowns,

Whose praises are sung by all those who have attained
perfection;
India has been conquered merely by thy footstep within her
bounds,
Thy title is, MUḤAMMAD HINDĀL!”

Mīr ‘Abdul Ḥayy, who also had a childish nature, wrote, in reply, the following quatrain:—

“O thou, at whose door a thousand monarchs like Cæsar hold
their crowns,
Whose praises exercise their tongues evening and morning!
May all the confines of the world, O Lord,
Be under the sway of the king of the world, MUḤAMMAD
AKBAR!”

He is Sayyid Muḥammad of Najaf who made a name in the Dakan^380a and came to Ilāhābād and paid his respects to the emperor. He was very unconventional in all outward observances and was bold and slovenly. It was reported to the emperor that he had written a satire in the Dakan on Shāh Fatḥullāh,^380b and when he was questioned on this point he denied that he had done so, saying, ‘In that country I would have taken no notice of a man of that sort.’ This remark increased the suspicion that he had written the satire and he was imprisoned, and it was ordered that all his papers should be examined in Fatḥpūr in order that it might be discovered, whether he had written satires on anybody while he was in Hindūstān. Some incriminating papers were discovered, and he remained in prison in Gwāliyār for ten³⁸¹ years until at length he was pardoned at the intercession of the eldest prince and other courtiers, and was summoned to Lāhor, but he still retained his evil disposition.

One day he came to the house of Qāẓī Ḥasan of Qazvīn,^381a who has the title of Khān, and the doorkeeper opposed his entering. ‘Itābī grappled with him, entered the assembly, which was a party of friends who had sat down to food, and said to Qāẓī Ḥasan, ‘It was this food, that led you to cause your door to be shut in the face of a learned man, a foreigner, and you have a perfect right (to keep your food to yourself).’ In spite of all that the master of the house and his guests could do in the way of excusing themselves, saying that the doorkeeper had not recognized him, ‘Itābī would not be appeased, and refused to sit down and eat. He had great skill in writing Persian and Arabic poetry, also in penmanship and in prose composition. He has composed a dīvān. The following couplets are by him:—

“We have scorched our wise hearts in the furnace of desire,
“We have burnt the lamp of the Ka‘bah at the door of the
idol-temple.”

“We have given thee permission to shed this innocent blood, ²⁷⁶
We have given it to thee verbally, in writing, and under a
formal attestation.”

“We swear by thy honour that we are the nightingales of
this meadow,

That the rose has bloomed and we know not where the
garden is.”
“In thy country the name of faithfulness causes weeping,
Both the messenger, and the letter which he bears cause,
each separately, weeping.

“The drum of thy munificence sounds loudly, but I can find
no way to the sun (of the assembly).
This special custom and public assembly of thine will kill
me.”³⁸²

“I have left thy street, besmirched with accusations;
I brought to it chastity, and I leave it defiled with sin.
May the black night of thy locks be pleased with the
multitude of hearts (offered to it)
While I stray, miserable, from thy street.
The fountain of Khiẓr^382a prides itself on receiving the dust
of my feet
While I go, thirstier than ever, from the dimple in thy
chin.
Sugar was poured out at each door at which I knocked,
thou wouldst think
That I had been to beg from that laughing lip.
I knocked at the door of the seventy-two sects of Islām,
and from the door of despair
I turned, hopeless of help from either fire-worshipper or
Musalmān.”

“In my impatience, ‘Itābī, I resolved to part from her, and
now
Each time the thought of her enters my heart I weep un-
restrainedly.”

A quatrain.

“In the love of thy face I have lost both learning and sense. ²⁷⁷
But what of these? I have lost my very soul
In following thee, whatever I had at the end of my life
Have I lost, and yet I have lost all evil.”

“It would not be wonderful if from the atmosphere of thy
face,
And from the heated iron of my heart, a film should form
on the mirror.”

After his release from confinement he was given a sum of a thousand rupees for travelling expenses and was placed under the charge of Qilīj Khān,³⁸³ who was ordered to send him off from the port of Sūrat on a pilgrimage to the Ḥijāz, but on the way to Sūrat he escaped and fled into the Dakan, where he took refuge with the rulers of the country, and there he still wanders about in the condition in which he formerly was.

He is a youth recently come to man's estate. He wrote the following couplet:—

“The reward for pain which is not worthy of my asking
after it
Is a glance to ask for which I am unworthy.”

This couplet for some time raised a great stir (among lovers of poetry) on every side in Lāhor, and on this account Ḥakīm Abū-'l-Fatḥ Gīlānī^383b was loud in ‘Ubaidī's praises, and presented him to the emperor. When he was asked to write more poetry he did not continue a poem on the lines of this couplet, but wrote some pessimistic verses which obtained no recognition, and since then he has disappeared, like all traces of his poetry.

He is descended from some of the religious leaders of the Turks. He is acquainted with book-keeping, and was for some time accountant-general to the imperial government. He has a dīvān ²⁷⁸ full of long and short odes. One day in Lāhor he represented that he wished t?? present the emperor with a complete copy of his works, and at the same time to recite before him a long ode and a short ode which he had just composed. As his poetry was known to be ridiculous, the emperor told him to keep the two odes by him and to insert them in the complete copy of his works when he should present it, in order that all his poems might be heard at one reading. He composed a long maṯnavī, like the maṯnavī of Khanjar Beg, which has already been mentioned. This couplet occurs in it,

“I am mean, of no consideration, and ugly;
What a plague of a contemptible mannikin am I.”

Raḥmān Qulī Sulṭān, his son, had skill in composing chrono-grams, and wrote this hemistich as a posy for his seal.

“The slave Raḥmān Qulī Sulṭān, the son of ‘Ishqī Khān.”

(The author adds)

“How should that ingenious man have a worthless son.”

Since in this selection I have imposed upon myself the duty of quoting, just as it was written, the poetry of all the poets of the age without any distinction, and most of whatever I found in my sources of information, whether melodious or inelegant, has been reproduced, I have, of necessity, quoted some of the verses of ‘Ishqī Khān, in order to show no unreasonable preference. And, in truth, the responsibility rests with Mīr ‘Alā-ud-daulah,^384a not with the author. The following couplets are his:—

“The reflection of thy eye, heavy with the drowsiness of
wine,³⁸⁵ has fallen on the wine,
Like a drunkard who, in his drunkenness, falls into the
water.”

“The bud, in desire of thy lip, smiled not at the breath of
the morning,
But in order to see thy face opened the eye of its heart.” ²⁷⁹

“As I write my letter to thee the paper is wet with my
tears,
I weep in jealousy of the pen which writes thy name on
the paper.”^385a

He was, at all events, a mild and dignified man, of old-fashioned manners. He has now wholly accepted the Ṣūfī doctrine of annihilation, and is become an old man nearing actual annihilation.

He was entitled Mīr Murtaẓā and was descended of the Sayyids of Dūghalbād.^385c He was one of the most trusted officers of the Khānzamān, and for some time held possession of Badāon. He was endowed with learning and accomplishments and was immoderately fond of jesting. When Ḥijāz^385d Khān, one of the chief men of Badāon, who wrote poetry under the name of Zāhid, recited, from the maṯnavī which he had written on the phrase ‘In the name of God,’ the following couplet:—

“When the crenellations of the letter sīn³⁸⁶ began to laugh
The letter laughed so as to show its gums,”

The Mīr said, “What are ‘the crenellations of the letter sīn?’ The doors and the walls are laughing at your verse.”

Sometimes from the sprightliness of his nature he would occupy himself by writing poetry.

The following couplet is his:—

“O heart, all night the street dog gets no sleep
From thy cries and lamentation and wailing.”

He came of the Saifi Sayyids of Qazvīn^386b and in book-keeping ²⁸⁰ and penmanship he came first among accountants and scribes, and he also had some proficiency in those branches of learning which are not treated of in Arabic literature. He was for some time a dīvān-i-sa‘ādat,^386c and when Karoris^386d were appointed throughout the empire of Hindūstān he, having with much trouble collected five karors (of dāms)³⁸⁷ from the Sambhal district, was appointed to the administrative and revenue charge of that district,^387a and at last he was for several years under suspension, engaged in rendering accounts to the dīvān and his honour was changed to disgrace, and he was subjected to torture, and suffered much, and he surrendered all that he had, even to the uttermost farthing,^387b to the imperial treasury, and, after surrendering all his possessions, surrendered his life with them. He composed a dīvān of short odes, a poem in praise of the people of his town,^387c a poem on roses and wine, and many other treatises in verse, but his poetry is all in the style of the poets of the time of Sulṭān Ḥusain Mīrzā,^387d and most of the works which I have named are in that style. The following verses are his:—

“The fresh down has sprung from her ruby lip with moisture
and splendour,
For she ever drinks water from the fountain of the sun.”

“I am thus fallen in the road of grief and toil like rubbish,
Perchance some breeze of thy favour and grace will raise
me from the dust.”

“O Lord, I am distracted by the multitude of my sins,
Show me some mercy, for I am heavily weighed down by
my sins.
I have grief in plenty, boundless sorrow, but no comforter.
How shall I make friends for myself? I am heavily
afflicted.”
It is evident that he composed these last few verses while
he was in prison.

He is entitled A‘ẓam Khān, and is well known for his good ²⁸¹ breeding, and for his varied accomplishments and gifts, and there is no other amīr who is regarded as his equal in depth of understanding or in capacity. As he used formerly, now and again, but rarely, to make trial of his ability in the composition of verse, the following few verses of his are quoted, in order that these memoirs may not be destitute of all mention of him.

“Since honour and reputation prevented me from obtaining
the desire of my heart,
I will henceforward shatter my reputation with a stone.”

He also wrote an illuminated copy of an ode composed by himself, the opening couplet of which was this:—

“O thou, whose curled lock is the fetter of my heart,
The love of whom is mingled with all the elements of my
body!”

The following couplets are also by him:—

“The affairs of the world have no stability,
It is better that my heart should be withdrawn from the
affairs of the world.”

“My heart is sick with the pain and grief of loneliness,
O physician of the sick heart, what dost thou prescribe?”

“My grief-worn heart has become dust in the road of fidelity;
See, my faithless love, the way of those who humble them-
selves to the dust.”³⁸⁹

He laid out a splendid garden in Agra, and in it built a garden-house adorned with paintings, and composed this quatrain for an inscription on the building:—

“O Lord, by the purity of heart of men of discernment,
Which is dearer to Thee than all other things,
Since this house has, by Thy grace, been completed,
Of thy favour send me honoured guests!”

There are in the world many records of his doings, one of which relates the story of his high-spirited departure on pilgrim- ²⁸² age to Makkah, and of his return in a different frame of mind, —one of the inevitable consequences of these evil days.^389a

He has written different kinds of poetry, both long and short odes. He was for some time in Gujarāt with Mīrzā Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad. When he came to Dihlī, after the deposition of Qāẓī Muḥammad, who was a fanatical Shī‘ah and an evil liver, the late Ḥakim ‘Ain-ul-Mulk^390a in Lāhor besought the Ṣadrs^390b to appoint Mullā ‘Ahdī to the Qāẓī-ship, and by way of an anticipatory omen found the words Qāẓī ‘Ahdī^390c to give the date of his imaginary qāẓī-ship, but it was all of no avail and resembled the story of an imaginary man riding an imaginary horse in an imaginary plain and playing polo with an imaginary stick and an imaginary ball. ‘Ahdī then went with the Ḥakīm to the Dakan, and nothing is known of him after the Ḥakīm's death, neither what happened to him nor whither he went.

The following verses are by him:—

A quatrain.

“Though the lip of my complaint was wet with blood,
The smoke from my heart arose from the chimney of my
eyes,
My tears rained down sparks and fire,
My sighs kindled and became like a burning coal.”

At the time when Ḥakīm ‘Ain-ul-Mulk departed from Lāhor and also (after a short time) from this world of wickedness and strife, the following quatrain, attributed to Ḥakīm Ṯanā'ī, was discussed:—

“Breathe once more, for thy Beloved is near thee,
And the bird of thy desire is near to the cage.
How long wilt thou say, ‘I am far from my Beloved?’
Look within thyself, for the Friend is very near thee.”^390d

Maḥvī composed the following quatrain:— ²⁸³

“Maḥvī, whose heart is near to all men,
Is near to the bud of the garden and to its thorns and
rubbish.
For this reason he was not repulsed from the litter of the
beloved,
That the sound of his weeping resembles the sound of its
bell.”

Ḥakīm ‘Ain-ul-Mulk composed the following in answer to both quatrains:—

“Since thy Beloved is near thee every moment,
Beware, for thy fire is near the dry grass!
O thou who hast fallen behind thy companions and lost the
way
Hasten, for the sound of the caravan's bell is near.”

Mullā ‘Ahdī composed the following quatrain and also wrote it, as a keepsake, in my common-place book, and our companionship in prayer was changed for separation:

“The freedom of this caged bird is near at hand,
And this flame is near to the thorns and stubble,
Grief would fly from me with a thousand wings and pinions,
Did it but know with whom it consorted.”

I wonder at my own hardness of heart seeing that I am able to sit and beat my breast with a stone in the absence of so many friends.

He is a Shīrāzī, and is now employed in the imperial library as ²⁸⁴ a librarian. He has a merry and nimble wit and occasionally writes poetry. The following verses are his:—

“I am fallen, like a helpless bird, into the cage
My broken heart is like a soundless bell.
Though I am more contemptible than an ant or a fly
I am suffocated by the straitness of the two worlds.”

Another quatrain.

“We have learnt the way to a cure for ourselves,
We have heaped up the harvest of our transgressions,
We have kindled the fire of hell for ourselves,
We have consumed ourselves with the fire of our own sins.”

Another quatrain.

“So long as the locks of the beautiful curl,
So long as the gestures and gait of the lovely are alluring,
So long as the arrow of the glance is in the brow of cruelty,
I die and live again each moment.”

A couplet.

“There is no rose in the rose-garden of this world which is
not tinged with the blood of some nightingale.”

In describing a horse he has written:

“From his great pace as he gallops, his limbs
Close on one another like drops of water flowing together.”

He was a high-minded young man of sound understanding and he composed poetry of all kinds well, but he became so puffed up with pride and conceit that he lost the regard of all, and he never reached old age. When he first came from his country to Fatḥ-pūr he attached himself to Shaikh Faiẓī above all others, and in truth, the Shaikh treated him well, and in this last journey he lived in the Shaikh's tents until the camp reached Atak, and was supplied with all the necessaries of life by the Shaikh, but at length, in accordance with the long-standing habit of the Shaikh, who is friendly with everybody for a week, a coolness sprang up between them, and ‘Urfī attached himself to Ḥakīm Abū-'l-Fatḥ, and afterwards, by means of a recommendation which he received from the Ḥakīm, to the Khānkhānān. with whom both his poetry and the esteem in which he was held made great progress daily. One day he went to Shaikh Faiẓī's house and found him fondling a puppy. ‘Urfī asked, “What is the name of this child of my lord's?” The Shaikh replied, “His name is well-known (‘Urfī)”, and ‘Urfī replied at once, “May it be auspicious.”³⁹³ The Shaikh was very angry, but to no purpose.

Both ‘Urfī and Ḥusain Ṯanā'ī^393a have wonderful good fortune with their poetry, for there is no street or market in which the booksellers do not stand at the roadside selling copies of the dīvāns of these two poets, and both Persians and Indians buy them as auspicious possessions, while it is quite otherwise with Shaikh Faīẓī, who has spent large sums from his jāgīrs in having his works copied³⁹⁴ and illuminated, and nobody asks for them, the only copy for which he has had any sale being the solitary one which he himself sent abroad.

‘The power of pleasing and grace of diction are gifts of God.’

‘Urfī has a dīvān of his collected poems, and a maṯnavī in the metre of the Makhzan-i-Asrār^394a which is known throughout the ²⁸⁶ world. The following few verses are quoted as a memorial of ‘Urfī:—

A quatrain.

“On the morrow, when the workers of every craft shall be
summoned,
When the good acts of Shaikh and Brahman shall be inves-
tigated,
There shall be taken from thee not a grain that thou hast
reaped,
But for everything that thou hast not sown a harvest shall
be required.”

The following couplets are by him:—

“He who thirsts for the blandishments of thy lip knows
That the frown on thy forehead is a wave of the water of
life.”

“Nobody has been born who can bear the pain of love;
Every afflicted one has betrayed himself by changing colour
as he told his story.”

“As I sing of love I weep bitterly,
I am but an ignorant child and this is my first lesson.”

“Step not beyond the bounds of ignorance, or else become a
Plato,
A middle course is a mirage with raging thirst.”³⁹⁵

The opening couplet of the ode from which the last couplet is taken is as follows:—

“My conversation in society consists of muttered speeches,
For here those reputed sensible are ignorant, and my speech
is Arabic.”

The following couplets are also by him:—

“How shall I endure my desire for my beloved, for, by the
laws of love
A mere glance is disrespect and a thought of the beloved is
derogatory to her.”

“Of what pain has it been decreed by Time that I should
die,
That the eyes of my soul have not gone forth to welcome?”

“I speak no word, for silence is better than speech, ²⁸⁷
I have no knowledge, for oblivion is better than knowledge.”

“The Ka‘bah would have circled round thy head and circum-
volated^395a it
Had it had but pinions and wings”

He is Mīr Muḥammad Khān-i-Kalān, who is well-known by reason of his high rank and position. His assemblies were always attended by learned men and poets. In spite of his constant employment in administrative business he found time occasionally to indulge in the customary recreation of writing verses, and collected a large dīvān of his poems. He used to say to the Emperor, ‘The boast of your reign is this, that a man like me has lived in it.’

The following verses are his:—

“In my youth the flower of my age was passed in ignorance,
And what was left of it has been passed in repentance.
Young man, thou hast sown nothing but the seed of despair
in the world,
Now the season of old age is come, and the time for tillage
is past.”

“Go Ghaznavī, associate with the dogs of the beloved,
Be content with a dry crust and make thyself independent
of the world,
Take the crown of pride from thy head and pass beyond
the stage of ‘we’ and ‘I,’^396a

Overthrow (in thy mind) the foundations of the kingdom of
this world, like Ibrāhīm, the son of Adham.³⁹⁷
Withdraw thy notice from thyself and thy friends that
thou may be at rest,
And if even the light of thy eyes should meet thee in the
way, turn aside.

When he was governor of Sambhal he gave great vogue to the following ode of Shaikh Sa‘dī^397a (may his tomb be hallowed):— ²⁸⁸

“The heart which loves and is patient must surely be a
stone,
For love and patience are a thousand leagues apart.”

He himself wrote as follows:—

“When the cupbearer's cheek is rosy with wine,
Drink wine to the sound of the flute, for the heart is sad.”

Mīr Amānī and other poets composed answers to these verses, in imitation of them, each according to his capacity and frame of mind, and one of them, the late Jamāl Khān of Badāon, who was a constant and intimate companion of the Khān, and was unrivalled in wit, composed an ode of which the following was the opening couplet,

“Thy cheek is ever rosy with the wine of delight,
My heart, like a closed bud, is constricted with grief in
meditating on thy mouth.”

When I was in Kānt-u-Gola^397b in the service of Ḥusain Khān^397c this ode reached me one night in a letter from Miyān Jamāl Khān and the next morning news came that he had been seized with colic in the place of public prayer in Sambhal on the ‘Īd-i-Qurbān,³⁹⁸ and had sickened suddenly, and in the flower of his youth had surrendered his soul to God. His bier was brought into Badāon. Some mention has been made of this event in the record of the reign,^398a and besides (the chronograms there given)^398b the words ‘Ah, Jamāl Khan has died!’ were found to give the date of his death.

In these days^398c whom have the heavens seated in safety
Whose existence they did not cut short like the morning's light?

He is Qāsim ‘Ali, son of Ḥaidar the grocer, and was notorious for his pride and groundless vanity. He used to call himself a Quraishī^398e until it became generally accepted that anybody who had no descent whatever to boast of claimed connection with the Quraish. Whenever he was ashamed of the arrival of his father in any social gathering and lost his temper his father used to say, ‘To spite you I will sit in the shop which I have in Agra, selling fruit and electuaries, and to everybody who comes to the shop, whether he questions me or not, I will say, ‘Let it be known that Qāsim ‘Ali is my son, begotten by me. You may kill him if you like.’”

Somebody asked Ḥaidar how many sons he had; he replied, “Eight, the particulars are as follows:—

“Two are mine, and two are my wife's, and two belong to
us both;
Two others there are which belong neither to my wife nor
to me.”³⁹⁹

Qāsim ‘Alī was in his youth very handsome, and used to sing at social gatherings, and was then for some time servant^399a to the Khalīfaḥ of the age (Akbar), became a man of some importance, and acquired the title of Khān,^399b and this case was an illustration of the remark made by a man when another said to him, “Have you heard that they have made so and so a Khan?” and he replied, “Well, the mannikin deserved it.”

His manner of forming his letters and his handwriting were like those of the master of the world.^399c His unformed hand and his ill-formed letters are like those of boys, but in spite of that hand and those letters he has a childish confidence in himself.^399d

During my twenty-one years' acquaintance with Ghubārī he has been constantly engaged in taking lessons in (what may be called) ²⁹⁰ the middle standard,⁴⁰⁰ and he used to compel his teachers to make obeisance to him, and if they did not consent to do so he would not come for his lesson, and in the lessons received under these unfortunate conditions he never progressed beyond the elements of accidence.^400a His taste in poetry may be estimated from the following verses:—

“I love water, and the bath is my place,
The bath-house is the house which is appropriated to me.”

In imitation of the opening couplet which runs,

“I wish for one hair from the curled lock of my love.
That is to say, I am an idolator, and I wish for a sacred
thread.”

He wrote the following:—

“I wish to explain my grief to the dog of my love.
That is to say, I am grieved, and I wish to explain my
grief.”

The following verses are also by him:—

“From her eyes nothing but calamity reaches me.
Nobody has ever such calamity.”

A quatrain.

“Everybody who is afflicted by love
Becomes acquainted with toil and grief;
Everybody who has found his way into love's circle
Revolves around calamity like a pair of compasses.”

Ghubārī departed from this world, very unwillingly, in A.H. 1000 (A.D. 1591-92), and the chronogram found for his death consisted of the words, “Qāsim ‘Alī Khān the fool.”^400b According to another account the year of his death was A.H. 1001 (A.D. 1592-93), and if this be accepted as correct the word jāhiḷ (‘ignorant’) substituted for the word ablah (‘fool’) will give the correct ²⁹¹ date.⁴⁰¹

Since thou art ignorant grieve not if they call thee fool,
For these two expressions are^401a synonymous.

He has composed a dīvān and has studied to some extent. He used to tell the following story:—

I was once in an assembly convened for the ecstatic dancing^401c of darvīshes by that king of saints and greatest^401d of pious men, Shaikh Ḥusain of Khwārazm (may God hallow his soul), and the chanters were chanting the following quatrain:—

“Throughout my life I have been one of those who wear my
skin as Thy garment,
I am one of that brotherhood who wear the ring of Thy
service in their ears,
If Thou showest me favour I am one of those who shout for
joy of Thee,
And if Thou showest me none I am one of those who are
silent for Thee.”

And his holiness the Shaikh, on hearing the last verse, was seized with holy rapture, and an ecstasy that communicated itself to others,^401e so that I too, blessed by being in his company, experienced holy rapture, and, springing up from my place as one beside himself, uttered the following couplet:—

“Whether Thou showest me favour or whether Thou show-
est it not
I am one of that brotherhood who wear the ring of Thy
service in their ears.”

His holiness the Shaikh seized me by the hand and whirled me round with him, and the delight of that moment never leaves my heart.⁴⁰²

He died in Āgra, in the neighbourhood of Shaikh Farīd's College, in A.H. 966 (A.D. 1558-59).

The following opening couplet of one of his odes is well known:

“The mouth of my Friend last night told me a secret mys-
tery,
‘I am the fountain of the water of life, and thou knowest
it not.’”

292 The following verses are also by him:—

“Why does not fate shed my blood where thou art not?
It would seem that this is beyond the power of fate.”
The words which fell from her lips were brief, and I could
not understand them,
The down around her lips is a marginal commentary^402a
brief enough.
In travelling the road of love for thee I arrived at no stage
At which I did not find that the pain of love for thee had
preceded me.”

He spent some time in India and returned to Shīrāz. The following verses are some of his:—

“I would not consent to the slaying of others, for I know
That death has taken the bitterness of death from the dag-
ger of my executioner.”
“Devotee, the knot in the string of thy rosary cannot be
loosed without sincerity:
Go, and for a time convert thy rosary into the sacred
thread of the fire-worshippers.”
“A pleasant country is the street of love,
For there all the malice of the heavens is changed to kind-
ness.”
“I am slain by the dagger of that slayer who so shed my
blood
That not one drop of it fell on the ground.”

He was the brother of Shāh Fatḥu-'llāh,^403b who has already been mentioned. When he came for the first time to Hindūstān Bairam Khān the Khānkhānān asked him, as Fārīghī was the poetical name of the well-known Shaikh ‘Abdul Ẉajd of Khavāf to whom he was closely bound in the bonds of friendship and religious dependence, to change his poetical name to Fā'iqī. He used this name for some time, but when he returned to ‘Irāq ²⁹³ he reverted to the use of his former nom-de-plume. He then came to Hindūstān a second time, and died here. His son, Mīr Taqī, was another Shāh Fathu-'llāh in his knowledge of astronomy and astrology, and I presented to him a part of twenty chapters which I had written on the astrolabe. He was a man of noble disposition and high aspirations, and his brother, Mīr Sharīf, had many excellences and perfections. Mīr Taqī used to say that in his family he and his brother, with their uncle, Shāh Fatḥu-'llāh, were the only ones that held the Sunnī faith, all the others being bigoted Shī'ahs. The following verses are by Mīr Fārighī:—

“Well is it for me that in accordance with thy promise
happy in my abode of toil
“I sit, glancing ever and again expectantly at the door.”
“To such a point does love at length bring intimate associa-
tion with the beloved
That the lover finds himself a stranger to separation.”
“On the humble body of Majnūn no scar was visible;
For the footprint of Lailā's camel was impressed on
him.”
“The festival time has arrived and I am constantly anxious,
Hoping, O Lord, that I may have speech with her, in order
to offer my congratulations.”
“So frequently has the country of my heart been ravaged by
the army of thy love
That the caravan of patience never unfastens its burdens
there.”
“Love's madness can easily unfasten those knots in love's
bonds
Which wisdom, with all its pretensions, cannot, with count-
less efforts, unfasten.”
“Fārighī has girded up his loins in the service of that lovely
one on the condition
That he never, until the day of resurrection, unfastens from
his waist the sacred thread of idolatry.”
“In her absence, O death, I have put up with my life,
But now I can no longer sit patiently waiting for thee.”

The following is the opening couplet of an ode which he wrote in praise of his holiness our sponsor the eighth Imām, Riḍā' (blessings and praise be upon him!):—

“When the money-changer of the recurring morn opened
his shop
He exchanged every copper coin that he had for a piece of
gold.”

He had travelled much and seen the world. He came to Hindūstān and then returned to his own country. He had some poetical genius. The following verses are his:—

“I wish that the flame of love may so strike my grief-
nurturing body
That, while I weep from its burning, water may fall on my
ashes.”
“I will give rest to my heart by patiently bearing her mes-
sage,
Though this (rest) is an impossibility to which I can never
attain.”
“Go, speak not of love's burning pain till the last trump
shall sound,
For this world is nothing but a house of mourning.”

He is the son of Nādirī of Samarqand. He was a jovial man, and expert at composing enigmas. He came to India and then returned again to his own country. The following verses are his:

“Since the tavern-keeper^405b described to me the properties
of wine,
My repentance of my repentance passes description.”

“When I saw her dark hair forming a garment round her
body
²⁹⁵ I believed it to be the garment of the holy pilgrimage and
wound it round myself.”

He is Sayyid Muḥammad, the cloth weaver, well known as Mīr Rubā‘ī. In this description of poetry he is the ‘Umar Khayyām of the age. He left this world in the course of the journey to Jaunpūr,^406a in the year H. 973 (A.D. 1565-66), and the words ‘Mīr Rubā‘ī made a journey,^406b were found to give the date of his death.

A quatrain.

“Fikrī has a head which is unfurnished with contents,
He has at his heart a secret pain for which there is no
remedy.
For an age he has made his head his feet on the road of
love,
He has set out on a road which has no ending.”

As his verses are very well known I shall conclude by quoting the following few quatrains and a couplet which are attributed to him:—

“O heart, though thy love be a warrior, fear not,
Though her business be oppression and mortal enmity, fear
not,

In the army of her beauty her two eyes are warriors,
For the rest, the down on her cheek and her mole are the
dark colour of the host.

“If one will not, like the sun, suffer the sword to be raised
above his head
The sky shall not be clad from head to foot in gold for him:
If the gardener will not endure the hardships of the thorn,
He shall receive into his bosom no loved one in rosy gar-
ments like a bud.”

“On the morrow, when nothing shall remain of this world ²⁹⁶
but a tale,
When signs shall appear of the Resurrection's spring,
The beloved ones shall raise their heads from the dust-like
verdure,
And we too shall raise our heads in courtship.”

“Thou goest with thy locks dark as night, and like dew on
every side
Salt (wit) rains from thee, alas for wounded hearts!”

He is a Caghatāī of noble descent. He has travelled much and has acquired honour by visiting the holy places of pilgrimage (Makkah and Madīnah). He has performed notable services in the field and at one time held the title of Khān, but on account of some misconduct he was degraded from that rank. One day he said, ‘Nobody has excelled me in these three shīns,⁴⁰⁸ Shamshīr (‘the sword’), shi‘r (‘poetry’), and shaṭranj (‘chess’).’ The Emperor at once replied, ‘The same might be said of two other shīns, shaiṭānī (‘devilry’) and shaṭṭāḥī^408a (‘effrontery’).’ Fanā'ī spent some time in prison, and when he was released he was seized with madness, which, taking him by the hand, led him away into some wilderness, whither, nobody knows. He has written a dīvān and his poetry is of the character of that of the debauched Caghatāī nobles. The following couplet is by him,

“Every one attains his object by his nightly cries of ‘O Lord,
O Lord!’
O Lord! Why do not I attain my object by my cries of
‘O Lord!’”

The following opening couplet also, which I have borne in my mind for the last fifty years, and which is quoted in the Tārīkh-i- ²⁹⁷ Niẓāmī,^408b is by him:—

“I say not that I have a house worthy to be honoured by
thy footsteps,
I am a stranger, and humble, and have but a waste corner.”

(The following is another opening couplet.)

“Whilst thy rosy face blossomed above the rosy wine
The wine blossomed in the cup from the reflection of thy
rosy face.”

He is a Sayyid, a story-teller, and has a mind adapted to poetry. He came from Ṭhaṭha⁴⁰⁹ and obtained a post in the Emperor's service. The following verses are by him:—

“Why didst thou needlessly pass by the unworthy?
And, if it was necessary to pass by him, why didst thou
glance towards him?
Thou wert in talk with a stranger, and, when thou sawest
me from afar,
If thou didst not completely veil thyself from me why didst
thou draw thy veil but a little?”

“When I arrived, and thou wert in talk with a stranger,
Thou didst distract his attention, and then glance covertly
towards me.”

“Fusūnī made his obeisance to thee merely to deceive others,
Had it not been for this such a worthless wretch would
have been unworthy of making his obesiance.”

“When she had, after making a thousand promises, shown
me her face but once,
She then, for fear of strangers, showed it but for a mo-
ment and went.”

“He who is slain by the glance of the beloved closes not his
eyes,
As he draws his last breath he is dazzled by the face of his
slayer.”

He was brought up in the household of Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥakīm.⁴¹⁰ By birth he belongs to the Langāh^410a clan. It seems ²⁹⁸ probable that he was captured by a soldier in some of the wars in Hindūstān and was placed in the service of the late Emperor, and was then brought up with Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥakīm. He is somewhat studious, in a desultory manner, and is moderately skilled in penmanship. He has a general knowledge of music, and can beat the drum after a fashion.^410b In body he is well proportioned. He came to court and paid his respects, with Qāẓī Khān of Badakhshān, between Jaunpūr and Āgra, when the Emperor was returning from his expedition to Patna. Although he does not study assiduously he is naturally somewhat ready in etymology, and it gradually becomes evident that he has understood the whole drift of any stiff argument.

The following verses are his:—
“Thou hast made a stranger the object of thy regard.
What means this?
Thou hast cast out the slave from thy regard. What
means this?
I have seen nobody in this age to equal thee in beauty and
grace.
But thou hast destroyed the value of beauty. What
means this?”

“What remedy is there but death for this sick body?
Go, physician, waste not thy pains on me.”

Nowadays it is reported that he boasts that he has written answers ^410c to most of the odes in the dīvāns of ancient and modern poets. As to what he has discovered from these sources it may perhaps become more generally known than it is at present.

He was a capable man. He died in Dihlī. The following quatrain is by him:—

“O thou whose face is bathed in rose water,
With ringlets curling around it like wreathed violets, ²⁹⁹
Thy eyes are like two beauties overcome with wine on one
pillow
Who have laid their heads together and are fallen asleep.”

Couplets.

“In these days freedom from care has become no more than
a tale,
Whither shall I go? What shall I do? The times are
very evil.”

“The piteous state of the faithful is caused by thy cruelty.
Remove the sword, for their blood is on thy head.”

In many separate branches of knowledge, such as poetry, the composition of enigmas, prosody, rhyme, history, philology, medicine, and prose composition Shaikh Faiẓī had no equal in his time. At first he used to write under his well-known poetical name of Faiẓī, but later, imitating the title of his younger brother, whom the Emperor describes in writing as ‘Allāmī,⁴¹³ and in order to glorify himself, he chose a poetical name in the same measure, viz. Fayyāẓī,^413a but it did not suit him, and one or two months later, having packed up the baggage of this life, he took it from the world with the most bitter regret. He was a master ^413b of malevolent activity, idle jests, conceit, pride, and malice, and one epitome of hypocrisy, baseness, dissimulation, love of pomp, arrogance, and ostentation. All Jews, Christians, Hindūs, and fire-worshippers, not to speak of Nizārīs and Sabāḥīs, held him in the very highest honour for his heresy, his enmity to the followers of Islām, his reviling of the very fundamental doctrines of our faith, his contemptuous abuse of the noble companions (of the Prophet) and those who came after them, and of holy Shaikhs, both dead and living, and of his unmannerly and contemptuous behaviour towards all learned, pious, and excellent men, both in ³⁰⁰ secret and openly, and both by day and by night. Not content with this he used, despite the sacred faith of Muḥammad (may God bless and assoil him and his family), to regard all forbidden things as lawful, and all the injunctions of the sacred law as unlawful, and, with a view to washing away the stain of his ill-repute, which the waters of a hundred oceans (poured over it) till the day of judgment will not wash away, he used, in the height of his drunkenness, and while he was ceremonially impure, ⁴¹⁴ to write a commentary^414a on the Qur'ān, written entirely in words which contained no dotted letter, and his dogs^414b used to trample on it in all directions. At last, after all his denial of the truth, his obstinacy, his pride, and his heresy, he hastened to the place to which he belonged, and went in such sort that I pray that nobody may see or hear of the like. When the Emperor went to visit him when he was at his last gasp, Faiẓī barked like a dog in his face, and the Emperor used to relate this story in open darbār, his face was swollen and his lips had become black, so that the Emperor asked Shaikh Abū-l-Faẓl what caused this blackness of the lips and suggested that Faiẓī had rubbed misī^414c on his teeth, as the people of India use to do, but Abū-l-Faẓl replied that this was not so, and that the blackness was caused by the blood which Faiẓī had been vomiting. But, without a doubt, the sufferings which he had already endured were very little considered with reference to his vice, his abuse of the faith, and his revilings of his holiness the last of the Prophets (may God bless him and his family, all of them). Many abusive chronograms were discovered for the date of his death. One was as follows:—

“When Faiẓī the atheist died an eloquent man uttered (as
the date of his death) the words,
‘A dog has gone from the world in an abominable state.’”^414d

Another said:

“The date of the death of that carrion Faiẓī is fixed by the
words ‘The four religions of fire.”⁴¹⁵

Another found the following chronogram:—

“Faiẓī the inauspicious, the enemy of the Prophet, ³⁰¹
Went, bearing on him the brand of curses,
He was a miserable and hellish dog, and hence
The words ‘what dog-worshipper has died’^415a give the date
of his death.”

In the same strain was the chronogram:

“The laws of apostasy have been overthrown.”^415b

And another wrote: “Faiẓī was an apostate.”^415c

And to the same effect is the following:—

“Since he could not choose but go, there is no help but that
The date of his death shall be found in the words, ‘He is
for ever in fire.’”^415d

He wrote poetry for a period of exactly forty years, but it was all imperfect. He could set up the skeleton of verse well, but the bones had no marrow in them, and the salt^415e of his poetry was entirely without savour. His taste in lewd raving, in boastful verse,^415f and in infidel scribblings, is well known, but he was entirely devoid of any experience of the love of truth, of the knowledge of God, and of any idea of a painful longing for God, and “a favourable reception is the lot of enemies.” Although his dīvān and his maṯnavī contain more than twenty thousand couplets there is not among them one couplet that is not as much without fire as his withered genius, and they are despised and rejected to such an extent that no one, even in lewdness, studies his verse, as they do those of other base poets.

And this is stranger still, that although he has spent the whole revenue of his jāgīrs in having his misleading lies written and copied, and has sent copies of them to all his friends, both far and near, nobody has ever taken a copy in his hand a second time.

Thy poetry has doubtless taken a lesson from the dignity
of the veil,
For it displays no desire to come out of its private corner
in the house.

The following few couplets are taken from his selected poems which he wrote as memorials of himself, and entrusted to Mirzā Niẓāmu-d-dīn Aḥmad and others:—

“Cover not thy eyelashes⁴¹⁶ when thy eyes travel, like feet,
(the road of love)
For stout wayfarers march with naked feet.”
³⁰² “Why dost thou cut my hand, thou sword of love? If
justice is to be done
Cut out the tongue of the slanderer of Zulaikhā.”
“When we cast our bounteous glance on those who sit in
the dust
We distribute even to ants brains like those of Solomon.”
“The flood of my tears will hardly turn thy heart of stone;
To turn this mill-stone the flood of Noah is required.”

“O love, overthrow not the Ka‘bah, for there, for a moment,
Those exhausted in the faith of love sometimes take rest.”
“O love, have I leave to remove from the shoulder of the
sky
To my own shoulder the banner of thy power?”
“How long shall I stake my heart on the blandishments of
the fair?
I will burn this heart and obtain a new heart.
Faiẓī, my hand is empty, and the road of courtship is be-
fore me,
Perhaps I shall be able to pledge my dīvān for this world
and the next.”

The following is the opening couplet of a boastful ode, of which he was very proud:—

“Thanks be to God that the love of beautiful ones is my
guide.
I am of the religion of Brahmans and of the faith of the
fire-worshīppers.”

The following couplet is also by him:—

“In this land there is a sugar-lipped multitude
Who have mixed salt with their wine and are drunk in-
deed.”
(Poet) say thyself in what part of this poetry there is any
savour.

The following couplets are from the Maṯnavī Markaz-i-Adwār ³⁰³ which he wrote in imitation of the Makhzan-i-Khiyāl⁴¹⁷ and which did not turn out fortunately for him:—^417a

“To beg^417b for what aid I come to this door,
That I have become richer in heart and hand?

I asked for little, but my stock increased
Then, though I sat down, my footsteps advanced.”

The following couplets are from his projected⁴¹⁸ maṯnavī, Bilqīsu-Sulaimān :—

“I set myself again to place
The slit of my pen opposite to the window of my heart:
There comes from that window and enters this window^418a
That very light which serves as a guide to the soul,
Although from this court of injustice
The throne of the Sulaimān of my words^418b has gone on the
breeze,
Yet it occurred to me to consider a plan
Whereby, by means of spells, I might bind the demons in
chains,^418c
Bind them, by what means I have, to the throne of my
rhetoric,
And adorn that (throne) from the treasures of my mind.”

The following is an enigma which he composed on the name of Qādirī,:—^418d

“I will leave the mark from love's brand
Since it is a memorial in my heart, and is the only scar
there.”

When he was absent as an envoy in the Dakan I sent him two letters from the lower slopes of the Kashmīr mountains, informing him of the Emperor's disfavour towards me and of his refusal to admit me to his presence in order that I might pay my respects. In the petition which Faiẓī sent to court he recommended me to the Emperor's favour and Shaikh Abū-l-Faẓl was ordered to embody that petition in the Akbarnāma in order that it might be read as an example of what such documents should be. The following is a copy of that petition, which was dated on the 10th day of the month Jamādī'u-l-Awwal, A.H. 1000 (February 23, 1592), and despatched from Aḥmadnagar to Lāhor:—

‘Refuge of the world! There lately came to me from Badāon two relatives of Mullā ‘Abdu-l-Qādir, in a very disturbed state of mind, weeping, weeping and tortured by anxiety. They told me that Mullā ‘Abd-l Qādir had for some time been sick, and had been unable to keep his promise to attend at court, that some ³⁰⁴ of the Emperor's officers had carried him off with force and violence, ⁴¹⁹ and that they did not know what the end of the matter would be. They also said that the long duration of his sickness had not been reported to your majesty. Cherisher of the broken spirited! Mullā ‘Abdu-'l-Qādir has much aptitude, and he has studied what the Mullās of Hindūstān usually study in the ordinary branches of learning. He acquired accomplishments under my honoured father, and I, your slave, have known him for nearly thirty-eight years. In addition to his acquirements in learning he has some skill in poetry, and good taste in prose composition, both Arabic and Persian. He has also acquired some knowledge of Indian astrology, and of accounts, in all their branches. He is acquainted with Indian and foreign music, and by no means ignorant of chess, both the two-handed and the four-handed game,^419a and has some practice in playing the bīn.^419b In spite of all these acquirements he is endued with many virtues. He is not avaricious, has a contented mind, is not vacillating, is truthful, straightforward, respectful, unambitious, humble-spirited, meek, moderate in his requests, almost entirely devoid of the dissimulation so common at court, and entirely faithful and devoted to the Imperial Court. When the imperial forces were sent against Kūmbhulmer⁴²⁰ he, having requested permission to accompany them, went thither in the hope of offering his life to your majesty, and was in action and was wounded, and when the fact was reported he received a reward. Jalāl Khān Qūrcī^420a first presented him at court, and said, when presenting him: “I have discovered for your majesty an Imām^420b with whom you will be well pleased. Mīr Fatḥu-'llāh^420c also acquainted your sacred majesty, to some extent, with his affairs, and my respected brother^420d is also aware of his circumstances; but it is well known that ‘a grain of luck is better than a load of merit.”

Since your majesty's court is the court of the just, your slave, acting as though he were present in person at the foot of the august throne, when he saw a helpless man suffering persecution, has represented the case to your majesty. Had he not represented it at this time he would, in a manner, have been guilty ³⁰⁵ of insincerity and want of proper regard for the truth. May God (who is praised) deign to keep the slaves of your majesty's court constant in the path of truth, justice, and righteous dealing under the heavenly shadow of your majesty, their Emperor; and may He long maintain your majesty as their shelter, the cherisher of the miserable, the bestower of favours, the coverer of faults, with boundless wealth, glory, greatness and majesty, by the honour of the pure ones who dwell in the courts of God and the enlightened ones who rise betimes to praise him. Amen. Amen.

If any should ask me what rules of humanity and faithfulness I observe in so harshly reviling one who had so much goodwill for me and so much sincere friendship, and especially how it is that I, forgetful of the command, ‘Mention not your dead but in connection with good,’ have thus written of a man after his death, and have become one of those who disregard their obligations, I reply, ‘All this is true, but what could I do?’ The claims of the faith and the safeguarding of one's compact with God are above all other claims, and ‘Love is God's and hatred is God's’ is an established precept. Although I was for full forty years in the company of Faiẓī, yet after the gradual change in views, the corruption of his nature, and the disordering of his disposition and especially in his mortal sickness, our relations were changed, and as our association together became mere hypocrisy we were freed each of the other. All of us have our faces set towards that court where all disputes shall be decided. “On that day the intimate friends shall be enemies to one another, except the pious.”⁴²¹

Among the property left by Faiẓī were four thousand six hundred valuable bound books, all corrected, of which it might have been said with but little exaggeration that most of them were either in the handwriting of the authors or had been written in the authors' time. These became the property of the Emperor, and when they were presented before him he caused them to be catalogued in three sections, giving the first place to books of verse, medicine, astrology, and music; the middle place to works on philosophy, religious mysticism,^421a astronomy, and geometry; and the lowest place to commentaries, the traditions,^421b books on theology, and on all other subjects connected with the sacred law.^421c

Faiẓī wrote a hundred and one books, the Nal-u-Daman⁴²² and others, which he used to reckon. When he was near death he wrote, at the earnest solicitation of some of his friends, some couplets in praise of the Prophet (may God bless and assoil him, and of his ascent,^422a and incorporated them in the Nal-u-Daman. The following couplets are taken from the conclusion of that work:—

“O King of Kings,^422b who seekest after wisdom,
Wealthy as the sea and glorious as the sky,
The world is a banquet linked with joy,
Thy reign is the wine, which stupefies the heavens;
I am the minstrel singing melodies drawn from the veins
of my heart,^422c
My pen is the sounding organ.
If from this banquet, in which thy conversation is the cup-
bearer,
I arise, my song will still remain.
The drinkers circulate the tale
That there is no^422d singer, and yet the assembly is full of
song.

To-day, with my honey-sweet music
I am Bārbud,⁴²³ thou the Khusrav of the age.
Though I have polished my pen on the heavens
I am standing before thee on one leg.^423a
Look now on the arrangement of my mystical characters
And now on my long years spent in thy service.
This poem, which bears on its tongue the name of love
Takes thy name^423b to heaven.
I am the inebriating wine of true wisdom,
If I ferment no blame is mine.
I am the bell of thy caravan
And must surely be excused if I give forth sounds.
The reward of my handiwork is this (appreciative) eye,
Which I reckon among the gifts of God.
A hundred nightingales, drunk with love, have arisen,
singing
That the rose of Persia has blossomed in India.
I have arrayed in splendour virgin thoughts
In the Ganja of my genius and the Dihlī of my mind.^423c
Before this, when my poems were all the current coin I
had
Faiẓī was the name written on my signet;
Now that I am chastened by (spiritual) love
I am Fayyāẓī^423d of the ocean of superabundance.^423e
In thy reign, incomparable King,
Have I plucked from the bush of time the rose of good
fortune.

The breeze of my genius has diffused the odour of roses
over my banquet,
My cup has been filled to overflowing with the wine of
delight;
I have sat laughing, like a cup of sparkling wine,
While the cupbearer, like the bottle, stood behind me
Drinking deeper draughts than either I or my good for-
tune,
My days have been good, but my means of spending them
better.
My gardener has been happy, like thy reign,
For my basil plant has grown freely.
These four thousand jewels of pure water,⁴²⁴
Which I have stirred up with the water which is like fire,
Accept, for the lustre of the gems is all thine,
They were produced that they might be scattered round
thy crown;
If I have scattered more than I have said
I have then reckoned my harvest without any deficiency.
From this ocean which, in its turmoil, rears its head to the
highest heaven
Gems bubble forth on the crest of each wave.
Thus employed, in the art of arranging mystic sayings,
My speech has set itself to no mean employment.
Every pithy phrase with which my pen has charged itself
Has been brought by my heart from distant recesses.
My pen points out to me the road to inscrutable mysteries
Where a mountain of meaning best appears,
Hidden under phrases slight as a blade of grass.
This book is illuminated with my heart's blood.
Its allegories are filled to overflowing with true wisdom.
If its melodies be chanted in the mountains
Their sound will dance among the grains of flowing sand.^424a

I have woven from my swiftly travelling breath
Sacred threads for the Brahmans of the nine monasteries.
My thought, which stirs up mystic truths,
Is an ocean which produces gems from its waters.
This writing, which brings to the light the essence of all
things,
Is but half the shadow of my pen.
Every truth contained in it is as water in the stream,
Every knotty saying is as the curl in lovely hair.
This poem is a pearl of which the price may be fixed
For it shows forth the felicity of both worlds;
This lovely idol from the workshop of Āẕar⁴²⁵ received
Its adornment in the month of Āẕar,^425a
In the thirty-ninth year of the Imperial reign, ³⁰⁸
In the new Divine Era,^425b
When I reckoned up the years of the Hijrī era
I computed them to be a thousand and three alifs.^425c
This garden, which is full of thy perfume
Is but one rose of the plant of thy boundless wealth.
I have the prospect of the joy of another cup
In laying out four gardens more.^425d
If love thus consumes me entirely,
I shall make moonlight shine from my ashes.
The transparent glass of my heart is melted,
And I will give it, as a mirror, into the hands of the
assembly.

The story-tellers of the market-place base their stories on
their dreams;
But I have awoken from such stories.
This is the arena of those who have traversed the heavens
And in it valiant heroes are to be descried;
Scribes whose very breath breathes magic, with the points
of their pens
Have completed the adornment of this epic.
I also, for the sake of making a name in the world,
Have with my skill in words made a talisman.
I melted down both my heart and my tongue
In displaying this picture to the world.
When my genius scattered its wit into pen,
The pen poured the water of life into the inkstand;
The Messiah saw musk in a moist bladder
And dried it with His breath.
Is this an inkstand filled with ambergris,
Or a censer emitting smoke of ambergris?
When this lofty dome (the sky) became my cradle
The year was 954 (A.D. 1547).⁴²⁶
Now that I have spent forty-nine years in this monastery
I have passed through the seventy-two sects (of Islām)
My meeting-place has been in the idol-temples of India,
The fire-temples of Persia have been in my heart.
With a hundred incantations and magical devices
Have I cleaned from the mirror of the king's heart the scum
of rust.^426a
This day, among the great tribe of the ages
The sky beat the naubat for me on the roof;^426b

Eloquence, that King who has been my surety,
Has enthroned himself on my tongue.
I have become both the equal of the amīrs
And the prince of poets.
In every direction I go, uttering my wise words,
The ranks of mystic significations bow the knee to me.
Since love entered into my mind ³⁰⁹
I have become the adorner of the diadem which is over the
nine thrones of the heavens.
The valiant swordsmen of the kingdom of rhetoric,
The archers of the battle of pretensions,
When they cast their eyes on my forces,
Cast down their shields in the field before me.
My pen, on account of my great fame
Writes as my autograph, ‘He who is mighty in speech’;
‘The pride of the philosophers’ is the writing on my fore-
head.
‘The greatest⁴²⁷ of the poets’ is the device on my seal.
The heavenly Key has opened
To my thoughts the door of mystic significations.
When my breath gave birth to this poem
Khiẓr^427a came, and bestowed on me his length of days.
If the door has been opened before me
My poems have also been endued with long life.
If I reckon up all that both worlds can give
I find it to be but dust from the stour^427b which I have raised.
This pen, which has traversed the whole of my poem,
Drives its splinters under the nails of bad penmanship.^427c
See now the drift of this book, which shall last for ever,
See boundless wisdom concealed in (boundless) love.

Those who are not dumb before this splendour
Are men who are not admitted to the privy chamber of
imagination.
As for him whose business is with words,
Let the age endow him with justice.
It is the practice of those of meagre wit
Ever to gibe at their contemporaries:
What of those who have fallen asleep, wrapped in the sheet
of the earth?
Knowest thou what they said of the men of their time?
And those who shall obscure my light with smoke
Will I afflict in their eyes (with their smoke).⁴²⁸
Moreover, a time will come when I shall be no more,
And shall no longer be the nightingale of this garden;
Then those who struck a thorn into my rose
Shall sigh for sorrow over my shrine.
O thou who hast poured the lees of the draught into my
pure wine
Pluck but a rose of the spring of justice,
Or else take my goods at my valuation;
Look to their worth and consider yourself fortunate in me.
In the morning, when I sing in this meadow
My melodies shed a hundred gardens of flowers.
I am humble as dust in the path of true appraisers
Who this day, despite the ungrateful,
³¹⁰ When they opened this treasure from my stock.
Cast on it a glance which justly estimated it
And looked (with pity) on other unfortunates.
They, like the ocean, teemed with gems
And the diver who brought the gems to the surface
delighted in their commendation.
Art is intensely jealous of love
For I have compounded this poem with love's magic.
This pen is the source of great wonder
That from a dry reed such moist sweetness should flow.

This breath of mine is a monument to love,
For it is vapour which arises from my inward fervour.
Fayyāẓī on this incantation of thine
How long wilt thou dilate?
It is best that thou should'st bring thy tale to a close
Before thou becomest, thyself, no more than a tale.
O thou consumed with love restrain thy breath;
Have done with love's tale, have done!”