The «complaints» may obviously be connected with the known facts of the poet's life, by supposing them to have been prompted by the persecution to which he was subjected on account of his opinions. His remarks on the Houris and other sacred subjects raised such a feeling against him that at one time his life was in danger, and the wonder is that he escaped at all in a city like Naishapur, where the _odium theologicum_ raged so fiercely as to occasion a sanguinary civil war. In the year 489 A.H., as we learn from Ibn Al Athir,[101] the orthodox banded themselves together under the leadership of Abul Kasim and Muhammad, the chiefs of the Hanefites and the Shafeites, in order to exterminate the Kerramians or Anthropomorphist heretics, and succeeded in putting many of them to death, and destroying all their establishments. It may be also that after the death of his patron, Nizam ul Mulk, Omar lost his stipend and was reduced to poverty. The satires probably owed their origin to the same cause. _Rien soulage comme la rhetorique_, and if Omar could not relieve his feelings by open abuse of his persecutors, he made up for it by the bitterness of his verses. The bitterness of his strictures on them was no doubt fully equalled by the rancour of their attacks upon him. The love-poems are samples of a class of compositions much commoner in later poets than in Omar. Most of them probably bear a mystical meaning, for I doubt if Omar was a person very susceptible of the tender passion. He speaks with appreciation of «tulip cheeks» and «cypress forms,» but apparently recognises no attractions of a higher order in his fair friends. The poems in praise of scenery again offer a strong contrast to modern treatment of the same theme. The only aspects of nature noticed by Omar are such as affect the senses agreeably--the bright flowers, the song of the nightingale, the grassy bank of the stream, and the shady garden associated in his mind with his convivial parties. The geographer translated by Sir W. Ouseley says of Naishapur, «The city is watered by a subterranean canal, which is conveyed to the fields and gardens, and there is a considerable stream that waters the city and the villages about it--this stream is named _Saka_. In all the provinces of Khorassan there is not any city larger than Naishapur, nor any blessed with a more pure and temperate air. » No doubt it was some of these gardens that called forth Omar's encomiums.