with Goethe and Heine! He is certainly one of the most fertile poets of Nature among the Lyrical Singers of all time, and the most exuberant, if not also the most spiritual, Hymnist the world outside of Christendom has yet produced. This estimate, however shaded or qualified, cannot but appear at first strangely exaggerated, and out of all just proportion, to those who mayhap read the name of Jeláleddín now for the first time. Let us listen, then, to the greatest students of Persian Poetry in the critical Nineteenth Century, the judges who have highest authority on the subject, and who have the best right to pronounce judgment on Jeláleddín. And let us hear in the first place, as is his due, the most learned Historian of Persian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, who with indefatigable industry and completest knowledge has adorned his pages with Extracts from no less than Two Hundred of Persia's greatest Poets. Joseph von Hammer, the great Austrian Orientalist (known later as Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall and as the Historian of Arabic Literature in seven immense volumes, containing Accounts of nearly ten thousand Authors) says:— 'Jeláleddín Rumi is the greatest Mystical Poet of the East, the Oracle of the Sofis, the Nightingale of the contemplative life, the Author of the Mesnevi (a celebrated double-rhymed ascetic poem), and the Founder of the Mevlevi, the most famous Order of Mystical Dervishes. As Founder of this Order, as the Legislator of the Contemplative Life, and as the Interpreter of Heavenly Mysteries, he is highly revered. And as such he has to be estimated by quite a different standard from that which applies to those Poets whose inspiration has not soared, like his, to the Vision of Divine things, to the primal Fountain of Love and Light. He cannot properly be compared either with Firdusi, the greatest of the Persian Epic Poets, nor with Nizami, the greatest of the Romantic Poets, nor with Saadi, the first of the moral Didactic Poets, nor with Hafiz, the chiefest of the erotic Lyrical Poets; for all these won the Palm of Poetry in entirely different fields from his. The only two great Poets of his kind, with whom a comparison can be in place, Senayi, the Author of the Mystical 'Flower Garden,' and Attar, the Author of the Mystical 'Bird Dialogues.' But both these works stand, as regards poetic merit, far below the Mesnevi, which is the Text Book of all The Sofis, from the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Bosphorus. The Collection of Jeláleddín's 'Lyrical Poems'—his DIVAN, properly so called—'is regarded by them as of still higher value; it is practically the Law Book and the Ritual of all these Mystics. These outbursts of the highest inspiration of its kind deserve to be more closely considered, as it is from them that we see shining forth as in clear splendour the essence of the Oriental Mysticism, the cardinal Doctrine that All is One—the view of the ultimate Unity of all