Letters of Edward FitzGerald, in Two Volumes. Vol. 1FitzGerald, Edward
General
Letters of Edward FitzGerald, in Two Volumes. Vol. 1
FitzGerald, Edward
Authors, English -- 19th century -- Correspondence; FitzGerald, Edward, 1809-1883 -- Correspondence
{311} In his 'Memoire sur la poesie philosophique et religieuse chez les
Persans.' His edition of the text of Attar's poem came out in 1857, but
the French translation only in 1863.
{312} In his 'Geschichte der schonen Redekunste Persiens.'
{313} Mrs. Cowell's father and mother.
{316} This Apologue FitzGerald afterwards turned into verse; but it
remained an unfinished fragment. Professor Cowell has kindly filled up
the gaps which were left.
A Saint there was who three score Years and ten
In holy Meditation among Men
Had spent, but, wishing, ere he came to close
With God, to meet him in complete Repose,
Withdrew into the Wilderness, where he
Set up his Dwelling in an aged Tree
Whose hollow Trunk his Winter Shelter made,
And whose green branching Arms his Summer Shade.
And like himself a Nightingale one Spring
Making her Nest above his Head would sing
So sweetly that her pleasant Music stole
Between the Saint and his severer Soul,
And made him sometimes [heedless of his] Vows
Listening his little Neighbour in the Boughs.
Until one Day a sterner Music woke
The sleeping Leaves, and through the Branches spoke--
'What! is the Love between us two begun
And waxing till we Two were nearly One
For three score Years of Intercourse unstirr'd
Of Men, now shaken by a little Bird;
And such a precious Bargain, and so long
A making, [put in peril] for a Song?'
{317} George Borrow, Author of The Bible in Spain, etc.
{318} Evan Banks, by Miss Williams. See Allan Cunningham's Songs of
Scotland, iv. 59.
{319} Boswell's Johnson, 11 April 1776.
{320} This struck E. F. G. so much that he introduced it into Omar
Khayyam, stanza xxxiii. Professor Cowell writes, 'I well remember
shewing it to FitzGerald and reading it with him in his early Persian
days at Oxford in 1855. I laughed at the quaintness; but the idea seized
his imagination from the first, and, like Virgil with Ennius' rough
jewels, his genius detected gold where I had seen only tinsel. He has
made two grand lines out of it.'
{322} A retired clergyman who lived at Bramford.
{323a} On Comparative Mythology. Oxford Essays, 1856.
{323b} Fraser's Magazine for April 1857.
{328} M. Garcin de Tassy scrupulously observed this injunction in his
Note sur les Ruba'iyat de Omar Khaiyam, which appeared in the journal
Asiatique.
{337} See Letter to John Allen, 12 July 1840.
{344} Rather of the Orthodox reader by Omar himself.
{348} Hatifi's Haft Paikar, a poem on the Seven Castles of Bahram Gur,
as I learn from Professor Cowell, 'each with its princess who lives in
it, and tells Bahram a story.' He adds, 'We always used the name with an
understood playful reference to Corporal Trim's unfinished story of the
King of Bohemia and _his_ Seven Castles.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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