“Joy, joy for ever! my task is done— “The Gates are pass’d, and Heaven is won! “Oh! am I not happy? I am, I am— “To thee, sweet Eden! how dark and sad “Are the diamond turrets of SHADUKIAM,[195] “And the fragrant bowers of AMBERABAD! “Farewell, ye odours of Earth, that die “Passing away like a lover’s sigh;— “My feast is now of the Tooba Tree,[196] “Whose scent is the breath of Eternity! “Farewell, ye vanishing flowers, that shone “In my fairy wreath, so bright and brief;— “Oh! what are the brightest that e’er have blown, “To the lote-tree, springing by ALLA’S throne,[197] “Whose flowers have a soul in every leaf! “Joy, joy for ever!—my task is done— “The Gates are pass’d, and Heaven is won!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ “And this,” said the Great Chamberlain, “is poetry! this flimsy manufacture of the brain, which, in comparison with the lofty and durable monuments of genius, is as the gold filigree-work of Zamara beside the eternal architecture of Egypt!” After this gorgeous sentence, which, with a few more of the same kind, FADLADEEN kept by him for rare and important occasions, he proceeded to the anatomy of the short poem just recited. The lax and easy kind of metre in which it was written ought to be denounced, he said, as one of the leading causes of the alarming growth of poetry in our times. If some check were not given to this lawless facility, we should soon be over-run by a race of bards as numerous and as shallow as the hundred and twenty thousand Streams of Basra.[198] They who succeeded in this style deserved chastisement for their very success;—as warriors have been punished, even after gaining a victory, because they had taken the liberty of gaining it in an irregular or unestablished manner. What, then, was to be said to those who failed? to those who presumed, as in the present lamentable instance, to imitate the license and ease of the bolder sons of song, without any of that grace or vigour which gave a dignity even to negligence;—who, like them, flung the jereed[199] carelessly, but not, like them, to the mark;—“and who,” said he, raising his voice, to excite a proper degree of wakefulness in his hearers, “contrive to appear heavy and constrained in the midst of all the latitude they allow themselves, like one of those young pagans that dance before the Princess, who is ingenious enough to move as if her limbs were fettered, in a pair of the lightest and loosest drawers of Masulipatam!”