This from Goethe, the calm, olympic God! This from Goethe, who believed in Greek standards of unemotional excellence! What was the result? In Hafiz, Goethe found another youth. He bathed in the spring of oriental love, life, was renewed and grew young. And he gave us again a poet’s book of youth, fire, fancy, _Der West-Östlicher Divan_. This book we owe to Hafiz! It has the fresh charm that distinguishes the _Vita Nuova_. It has all that delights in books of youth, without defects. Goethe exclaimed with joy: “I will grow young! I will mingle with the herds’ boys in the desert! I will refresh myself in the oasis, in the waste places!” Sometimes we are forced to think he borrowed from this Eastern poet. But he did not try to conceal it. He was great enough to borrow without bowed head. Hafiz’ meters and somewhat of his manner have become naturalized in Germany, thanks to men like Platen, Rückert. The Germans, too, have translated Hafiz better than other nations. There we find him freest from foreign substance, clearer, less _betrübt_. Hafiz has the conversational freedom, fluency, which distinguish Tu Fu, and which give his poems freshness. Sometimes they have effect of brilliant improvisation, that promptitude of the moment, which fastidious Watteau held to be the essential of art. He has primal fire. His sunlight dazzles us. It is too strong for eyes accustomed to dilutions, to tempered shadows. His roses are brilliant, richly scented, and of the East; they are unlike pale, pastel tinted shadows into which Eighteenth Century art conventionalized them. He had not learned to like the mixing of light with shadow. He paints as Watteau painted his _Italian Clown_, under direct hard light, straight fronting us. We must learn to see with a painter’s trained eye the modulations of white. He knew how to _harmonizer le blanc_. Watteau, the lyric painter, is his kin in plastic art of the brush. He is likewise his kin in scornful, contemptuous creation of beauty, and in his scorn of things that perish. But it is not wise to write of one art in terms of another. Strong indeed must have been the personality that burst priestly restraint six hundred years ago! And sure indeed was his realization of self. What capability for suffering! What a tender heart in the midst of joy that is pagan! He was a tearful jester, a scornful, sardonic romancer, a gentle, heroic reader of the riddle of life. In his plaint there is perhaps something of Verlaine, of Villon. But nothing of their manner. His grief never became the melancholy of a less vigorous age. Always in it there was joy of the struggle, strength to endure. A peculiar mental combination in truth; mediæval seriousness from which thought of death is seldom absent, combined with the reasoned blitheness of a Greek.