“When the moon beheld She bade all the stars to vanish. All turned pale, and set, As she spoke their light to banish. Cleared was heaven’s face And the sun arose in splendour; Then a Child appeared, Sweet the Name He had, and tender.” [41] Hovhannes Erzingatzi (b. 1250) was educated in a monastery on the confines of Georgia and Armenia under a bishop who was renowned for his learning. He returned to Erzingan in 1272 and travelled to Jerusalem in 1281, in the course of his journey passing through Cilicia in order to visit the Armenian royal seat, where King Leon was then reigning. By his learning and talents he attracted the attention of the Catholicos, who appointed him director of all the schools in the city. By order of the Catholicos, he wrote a grammar, remarkable for its dear and comprehensible style and language. He also came under the notice of the king. At the annual horse race two of the king’s sons were among the competitors. On this occasion Erzingatzi made a speech, which left a great impression and gained him recognition as an orator. In Cilicia he learnt Latin and made several translations from that language into Armenian. He wrote many Biblical commentaries, besides other religious and devotional works, as well as treatises on astrology; but his fame rests chiefly on his verse. In addition to religious and moral poems, he wrote love songs, and lays relating to nature. In his ethical as well as in his love poems we find quaint metaphors and similes. As, for instance, in the following stanza, where our poet seems to be forestalling Bunyan:— “All my sins I once amassed And sat down before them weeping. When the caravan went past With my load I followed, leaping. Then an angel that we met, ‘Woful pilgrim, whither farest? Thou wilt there no lodging get With that burden that thou bearest.’” In another poem, entitled “Like an Ocean is this World,” which appears on page 59 of this volume, he uses the metaphor afterwards employed in Donne’s Hymn to Christ and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar. His love poems are exquisitely fresh and rich. The aesthetic character of his love and his enthusiasm for beauty are shown by his declaration, in one of the poems, after a rapturous expression of his passion for a lady of whom he gives a rich-hued word-portrait, that the only thing that keeps his feelings within bounds is the knowledge that, after death, her face will wither and its colours fade.