I was, ere a name had been named upon earth, Ere one trace yet existed of aught that has birth: When the locks of the Loved One streamed forth for a sign And Being was none, save the Presence Divine. Named and name were alike emanations from Me, Ere aught that was 'I' yet existed, or 'We'; Ere the veil of the flesh for Messiah was wrought, To the Godhead I bowed in prostration of thought; I measured intently, I pondered with heed (But, ah, fruitless my labour!) the Cross and its Creed: To the pagod I rushed and the Magian's shrine, But my eye caught no glimpse of a glory divine; The reins of research to the Kaaba I bent, Whither hopefully thronging the old and young went; Candahar and Herat searched I wistfully through, Nor above nor beneath came the Loved One to view. I toiled to the summit, wild, pathless and lone, Of the globe-girding Kaf,[55] but the Anka[56] had flown! The seventh earth I traversed, the seventh heaven explored, But in neither discerned I the court of the Lord. I questioned the Pen and the Tablet of Fate, But they whispered not where He pavilions His state; My vision I strained, but my God-scanning eye No trace that to Godhead belongs could descry. My glance I bent inward: within my own breast Lo, the vainly sought elsewhere! the Godhead confessed! Jalaluddin's chief work, the Masnavi, containing upwards of 26,000 couplets, was undertaken at the instance of one of his disciples and intimates, Husam-ud-din, who had often urged him to put his teaching into a written form. One day when Husam-ud-din pressed the subject upon him, Jalaluddin drew from his turban a paper containing the opening couplets of the Masnavi, which are thus translated by Mr. Whinfield:-- Hearken to the reed flute, how it discourses, When complaining of the pains of separation:-- 'Ever since they tore me from my ozier-bed, My plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears. I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs, And to express the pangs of my yearning for my home. He who abides far away from his home Is ever longing for the day he shall return; My wailing is heard in every throng, In concert with them that rejoice and them that weep.' The reed flute is one of the principal instruments in the melancholy music which accompanies the dancing of the Mevlevi dervishes. It is a picture of the Sufi or enlightened man, whose life is, or ought to be, one long lament over his separation from the Godhead, for which he yearns till his purified spirit is re-absorbed into the Supreme Unity. We are here reminded of the words of Novalis, "Philosophy is, properly speaking, home sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home."