Hafiz was a jovial fellow with a host of friends. They played part in his life, we gather from his poems. There we see the shadowy, unnamed forms of a merry, talented company. Youths, handsome as Antinous of old, but of whose name we have no slightest hint, lure us with charm of mystery. It would be interesting to know the youthful friends with whom he jested, made merry. Like the Greeks, the Persians loved the beauty of men in youth. They have written about them, as the Greeks wrote. There are lines which are made more acceptable by changing the personal pronoun to feminine gender. In poetry today friendship is seldom celebrated. Nor more do we find eloquence of denunciative wrath. Such elements of power, of rebellion, belong to an earlier age, to the day when Cicero was orating against Cataline, or when Firdusi was writing his splendid satire to Sultan Mahmud. Our poetry, symbolically speaking, is what autumn says to the rose. Hafiz’ poetry is what spring says to the same immortal flower. And the difference is the difference between things that live and things that die ... and rise not. Many and varied qualities go to this lyric supremacy: the natural art of Petofi, its characteristic lyric freedom, the golden fluency of Puschkin; the pitiful sweetness of Catullus; the intellectual reach of Rûmi, the mystic; the limpid racial charm of Mistral, all are here, but made more direct, informed with fiercer fire. Hafiz was last of the great ones. After him came imitation, insincerity, mental decay. Dschami, who lived in the century after Hafiz, writing of it says: “The new scholars have invented to be sure verse and rhyme, but except bare verse and rhyme everything else has vanished. No one troubles himself whether it contains phantasie, truth, or falsehood. And yet Oh! Great God, how splendid is poetry! How exalted, how dignified! Oh that I were a poet! Where is there an art more splendid, that more mightily ensnares!” Dschami came after the great ones. It has been wittily remarked of him that he possessed all their qualities _except their originality_. Rückert says of him: _Dschami hat nah daran gedichtet_, referring to the masters of Persian poetry. The heart of every Persian echoes to Hafiz, just as Germany, and indeed Europe, has echoed to the music of Heine. It is interesting to note in passing, that in 1814 a poet was born in Shiraz, Hussein Ali Mirza, who has been accused of imitating Heine. We translate from an orientalist: “... either the translator has _frisiert à la Europa_ too greatly, the new Iranian poet, Prince Hussein Ali, or else he has read Heine. This kind of sentiment does not belong to the East.” Heine and Hafiz were most alike perhaps in their consuming fear of death. They were so vivid the thought of _not being_ was terrifying.