The Poetry of the Orient

ometimes contain forty or fifty couplets. Here is a brief specimen of the Ghazel from Trench's Eastern poems. THE WORLD'S UNAPPRECIATION. " What is the good man and the wise ? Ofttimes a pearl which none doth prize; Or jewel rare, which men account A common pebble, and despise. Set forth upon the world's bazaar, It mildly gleams, but no one buys, Till it in anger Heaven withdraws From the world's undiscerning eyes: And in its shell the pearl again, And in its mine the jewel, lies." But let us pass from form to life and substance. It is unfair and misleading to say, with indiscriminate universality, that Oriental poetry is thus, Western poetry so; because, among the immense treasures of Eastern literature, gathered by its native bards during so many generations, there is almost every conceivable variety of subject and treatment, marked by almost every possible mode and degree of thought, imagery, and emotion. Eastern writing is not, as many seem to think, all compact of foolish hyperbole, petty conceit, and mystic jugglery. It is not all, as many of the specimens mostcirculated might lead us to imagine, in the strain of " He lifted his head from the collar of reflection, drew aside the veil of silence, and strewed the pearls of his speech to the bewildering delight of his auditors." In its different departments, though it is indeed often characterized by this childish profusion of weak and huddled metaphors, it yet possesses narrators as graphic in precision an...