Each was born upon crest of an age of transition that resembles the one in which we live. A period that followed wars! Heine was born the last year of the Great Century, 1799. He saw blind worship of royal power, prerogative, give way to the modern spirit of freedom. Hafiz was born at end of a period of religious intensity which gave way during his life to a genial culture. Both felt the battling, invigorating influences of two distinct ages, each of which was strongly marked. In Heine’s day art and letters reached highest development in Europe, just as lyric verse did in Persia in the age of Hafiz. And again in China, under Tang Emperors. After them came _le déluge_, which took guise of a wide-spread dilettantism, form without matter. Both Heine and Hafiz were pagans in that they clung to world of the senses; but they were modern in their lack of calmness, their restlessness, and in their dramatic dissatisfaction. Their hearts were lutes upon which the winds of the world blew. And with them love and hate were the destructive passions of an Asiatic race. Both were past masters of the art of expression. They knew how to say much in little. They could condense history or a romance into a quatrain, a couplet. Both were great and fluent artists. And they fought in their own way as best they could the battle of enlightenment of the human spirit. Each hated cant, hypocrisy, cowardliness, and vain seeming. Each felt and suffered the scorn, the hatred of his fellow men, then learned sadly to know that he who wishes to accomplish anything whatsoever, or has ideals of any kind to fight for, must know that the wings of his spirit are strong. Each clung pitifully while the world abused and reviled him, to the only real thing he could find, to the only thing that gave pleasure, that intoxicating world of the senses whose too frequent kiss, like that of the Slavic Venus, brings death. The Greek had the sanest view of this world’s life, the surest sense of beauty. The Hebrew had such a pitiful thirst for love, for something stable amid change, it stung him to desperation. The Persian thought most deeply, most logically of the mystery of life. The result of his thinking was, _We can not know. We can not know._ In expression each was an artist. And each was great because he was sincere. _Palmam qui meruit ferat._ I read Horace first in an old university town in the north. Each night as I walked home from lectures, autumn leaves were being burned in fragrant piles, under long rows of trees that still were faintly amber, faintly crimson. I came from the burned plains where there were no trees. And at night over these same richly tree-shaded streets, and over the broad lonely campus where dark pointed evergreens grew, the Hunter’s Moon hung, large and lustrous.