(_a_) Taking, then, the Oriental lyric first, we may observe that it differs essentially from the lyrical composition of the West through its inability to attach to it the independent personality and free spirit of the poet, or that unity which characterizes every content of romantic art, its essential infinity, reflecting, in fact, the potential depth of the romantic soul. Such a distinction is only in keeping with the universal principle of the East. The individual conscious life is here, referably to its content, directly absorbed in the detail of external fact, expressing itself under the condition and specific relations of this inseparable unity. And, from a further point of view, it asserts itself, without being able to secure a firm ground of stability in itself, as opposed to what it conceives to be of potency and substance in Nature and the conditions of human existence, which it wrestles to reach whether through emotion or imagination, at one time situated towards it rather in the relation of pure opposition, at another with more freedom, but in either case with ultimate failure. What we find here, therefore, if we confine our attention to _form_, is not so much the poetic expression of independent ideas over objects or their connections, as it is the bare mirror of this unreflecting absorption,[17] wherein the individual consciousness does not disclose itself in its own self-concentration as free personality,[18] but rather in its self-annulment[19] before the external object or condition. Thus regarded, the Oriental lyric frequently, particularly in its contrast to the romantic, assumes a more objective tone. Here we shall often enough find that the poet does not so much express facts and conditions as they affect him, but rather as they are in themselves, a disclosure which frequently bestows on them an independent soul of vitality of their own. For illustration we may take that exclamation of Hafis: "Come, O come! The nightingale passeth from the soul of Hafis once again over the scent of the roses of delight."