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 The Kasidah (couplets) of Ha i Abdu 
 
 3 1924 013 448 117 o..».. 
 
THE KASIDAH 
 
 hAji ABDU AL-YAZDI 
 
One Hundred Copies only, each numbered, have been printed of this Edition. 
 NoQ 
 

 (jr— ^ 
 
 THE KASIDAH 
 
 (COUPLETS) 
 
 OF hAjI ABDU AL-YAZDI 
 
 A LAY OF THE HIGHER LAW 
 
 TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY HIS FRIEND AND PUPIL, F. B. 
 
 BY 
 
 CAPTAIN SIR RICHARD F. BURTON 
 
 K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S., &c., &c., &c. 
 
 LONDON 
 H. S. NICHOLS AND CO 
 
 3 SOHO SQUARE LONDON W 
 MDCCCXCIIII 
 
PREFACE 
 
 /^N the return journey from Meccah, when Richard Burton could secure 
 
 any privacy, he composed the following exquisite gem of Oriental 
 
 poetry, and called it " The Kasidah," or " The Lay of the Higher Law," 
 
 by Haji Abd6 al-Yazdi, which was one of his Eastern noms-de-plume. 
 
 In his little foreword to the Reader, the better to disguise his authorship, 
 
 he calls himself the Translator, and signs " F. B.," or Frank Baker, an 
 
 English nom-de-plume from Francis his second name, and Baker his 
 
 mother's family name. It was written twenty-seven years before he 
 
 ventured to print it. It reminds one, more than any other poem, of 
 
 the Rubaiydt of Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Khorasan, 
 
 known as the tent -maker, written in the eleventh century, which poem 
 
 was made known by Mr. Edward Fitz-Gerald in 1861, at one and the 
 
 same time, to Richard Burton, to Swinburne, and to Dante Rosetti. 
 
 Richard Burton at once claimed him as a brother-Sufi, and said that 
 
 all his allusions were purely typical, and particularly in the second 
 
 verse : — 
 
 II. 
 
 " Before the Phantom of False morning died, 
 Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried, 
 ' When all the Temple is prepared within, 
 Why nods the Drowsy Worshipper outside?'" 
 
 Yet the Kasidah was written in 1853 — the Rubaiydt he did not 
 know till eight years later. 
 
 It is a poem of extraordinary power, on the Nature and Destiny 
 of Man, anti-Christian and Pantheistic. So much wealth of Oriental 
 learning has rarely been compressed into so small a compass. It is a 
 
THE KASiDAH 5 
 
 great revelation of the strange phases of Eastern thought and specu- 
 lation; it is learned in every tongue and science; it shows a thorough 
 acquaintance with Persian and Greek mythology, with Mormonism 
 and Comtism, Huxley and Milton, as well as Buddhistic philosophy. 
 It sets forth the Gospel of Self-Cultivation ; it shows a philosopher 
 of much contemplative power, and those who did not know the 
 authorship thought it must have been written by a polyglot Eastern, 
 with Cosmopolitan tendencies. 
 
 I was laughed to scorn by a small section of the press for the 
 following remark in my late " Life of Sir Richard." I said " that I 
 did not believe that this poem had its equal, that it is quite unique." 
 I said " it will ride over "the heads of most, it will displease many, but 
 it will appeal to all large hearts and large brains for its depth, its 
 height, its breadth, for its heart and nobility, its pathos, its melancholy, 
 and its despair. It is the very perfection of romance ; it seems as the 
 cry of a Soul, wandering through space, looking for what it does not 
 find. I have read it many times during my married life, and never 
 without bitter tears, and when I read it now it affects me still more ; 
 he used to take it away from me because it impressed me so." I do not 
 think that Mr. W. D. Scull will be vexed with me for quoting his 
 opinion, as one out of many letters that I have received on the subject. 
 In his letter he reminds me of an incident which I forgot to mention 
 before : — He asks me to tell him about " a star sapphire," which Richard 
 Burton carried on his person as a talisman, in the heart of Arabia, and 
 in the deserts of Africa, because the sight of this wonderful gem always 
 inspired an almost reverential respect. The wild Arabs and Negroes 
 would gaze at the stone, then at its possessor, concluding that he had 
 a talisman of unexampled power, and they would render him all possible 
 assistance for fear of incurring his vengeance. 
 
 Speaking of my Biography of my husband, Mr. W. D. Scull was 
 good enough to say "the whole book has produced an impression on me, 
 whose depth I cannot gauge — from its greatness — but full as the Life is 
 of the most valuable and original matter, to me its great raison d'etre is 
 that ' Tinkling of the Camel Bell.' It is hard to judge of a thing in the 
 
 h 
 
THE KASlDAH 6 
 
 first heat of admiration, but it seems to me worthy to stand level with 
 the greatest poems of the Earth, and in front of most ; certainly 
 there is not one that may stand before it, even Ecclesiastes, which to me 
 is a poem of the highest rank, too. No doubt the same opinion has 
 reached you from all quarters, and I am one of many." And in a letter 
 which I have from Miss Guglielma Frances Moss, she says, " Most 
 especially my gratitude goes out to you, for giving me the knowledge 
 of that marvellous Kasidah, before whose deep probing Tennyson's 
 ' In Memoriam ' pales into mere beautiful child's speech, and Job's 
 ancient drama alone seems worthy to be coupled. So overpowered 
 I have been by this poem, that had I not seen that you purposed 
 publishing it separately, I should have entreated permission to edit it, 
 that the World might learn what manner of man it had had sent it. 
 Stranger as I am to you, I feel that you are too world-wide in your 
 sympathies to resent the reverent thanks of one to whom your ' Life 
 of Sir Richard ' has proved a very revelation." 
 The Kasidah needs no higher praise. 
 
 ISABEL BURTON. 
 Febriuiry 15th, 1894. 
 
Let his page 
 Which charms the chosen spirits of the age, 
 Fbld itself for a serener clime 
 Of years to come, and find its recompense 
 In that just expectation. 
 
 (Shelley.) 
 
 Let them laugh at me for speaking of things which they do not 
 understand ; and I must pity them while they laugh at me. 
 
 (St. Augustine.) 
 
TO THE READER 
 
 The Translator has ventured to entitle a " Lay of the Higher Law " 
 the following Composition, which aims at being in advance of its 
 time ; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such 
 unpleasant forms as the " Higher Culture." The principles which 
 justify the name are as follows : — 
 
 The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally 
 divided and distributed in the world. 
 
 He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole 
 and sufficient object of human life. 
 
 He suggests that the affections, the sympathies and the " divine 
 gift of Pity " are man's highest enjoyments. 
 
 He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion 
 of " Facts, the idlest of superstitions." 
 
 Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially 
 reconstructive. 
 
 For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the 
 curious reader is referred to the end of the volume. 
 
 F. B. 
 
 Viciiim. Nov. 1880. 
 
THE KASIDAH 
 
 T 
 
 HE hour is nigh ; the waning Queen walks forth to rule the later night ; 
 Crown'd with the sparkle of a Star, and throned on orb of ashen light : 
 
 The Wolf-tail' sweeps the paling East to leave a deeper gloom behind. 
 And Dawn uprears her shining head, sighing with semblance of a wind : 
 
 The highlands catch yon Orient gleam, while purpling still the lowlands lie; 
 And pearly mists, the morning-pride, soar incense-like to greet the sky. 
 
 The horses neigh, the camels groan, the torches gleam, the cressets flare; 
 The town of canvas falls, and man with din and dint invadeth air : 
 
 The Golden Gates swing right and left ; up springs the Sun with flamy brow ; 
 The dew-cloud melts in gush of light ; brown Earth is bathed in morning-glow. 
 
 Slowly they wind athwart the wild, and while young Day his anthem swells, 
 Sad falls upon my yearning ear the tinkling of the Camel-bells: 
 
 O'er fiery waste and frozen wold, o'er horrid hill and gloomy glen. 
 
 The home of grisly beast and Ghdl,'' the haunts of wilder, grislier men; — 
 
 With the brief gladness of the Palms, that tower and sway o'er seething plain, 
 Fraught with the thoughts of rustUng shade, and welling spring, and rushing rain ; 
 
 With the short solace of the ridge, by gentle zephyrs played upon. 
 Whose breezy head and bosky side front seas of cooly celadon ; — 
 
 'Tis theirs to pass with joy and hope, whose souls shall ever thrill and fill 
 Dreams of the Birthplace and the Tomb, — visions of Allah's Holy Hill.' 
 
 I The false dawn. 2 The Demon of the Desert. 3 Arafat, near Meccah. 
 
THE KAStDAH 2 
 
 But we ? Another shift of scene, another pang to rack the heart ; 
 
 Why meet we on the bridge of Time to 'change one greeting and to part ? 
 
 We meet to part ; yet asks my sprite, Part we to meet ? Ah ! is it so ? 
 
 Man 's fancy-made Omniscience knows, who made Omniscience nought can know. 
 
 Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of MUST, 
 Without our leave or askt or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust? 
 
 That Eve so gay, so bright, so glad, this Mom so dim, and sad, and grey; 
 Strange that life's Registrar should write this day a day, that day a day! 
 
 Mine eyes, my brain, my heart, are sad, — sad is the very core of me ; 
 All wearies, changes, passes, ends ; alas ! the Birthday's injury ! 
 
 Friends of my youth, a last adieu ! haply some day we meet again ; 
 
 Yet ne'er the self-same men shall meet ; the years shall make us other men : 
 
 The light of morn has grown to noon, has paled with eve, and now farewell ! 
 Go, vanish from my Life as dies the tinkling of the Camel's bell. 
 
 In these drear wastes of sea-born land, these wilds where none may dwell but He, 
 What visionary Pasts revive, what process of the Years we see : 
 
 Gazing beyond the thin blue line that rims the far horizon-ring. 
 
 Our sadden'd sight why haunt these ghosts, whence do these spectral shadows spring? 
 
 What endless questions vex the thought, of Whence and Whither, When and How ? 
 What fond and foolish strife to read the Scripture writ on human brow ; 
 
 As stand we percht on point of Time, betwixt the two Eternities, 
 
 Whose awful secrets gathering round with black profound oppress our eyes. 
 
 " This gloomy night, these grisly waves, these winds and whirlpools loud and dread : 
 What reck they of our wretched plight who Safety's shore so lightly tread ? " 
 
 Thus quoth the Bard of Love and Wine,^ whose dream of Heaven ne'er could rise 
 Beyond the brimming Kausar-cup and Houris with the white-black eyes ; 
 
 I H4fiz of Sliiraz. 
 
THE KAStDAH 3 
 
 Ah me ! my race of threescore years is short, but long enough to pall 
 My sense with joyless joys as these, with Love and Houris, Wine and all. 
 
 Another boasts he would divorce old barren Reason from his bed, 
 
 And wed the Vine-maid in her stead ; — fools who believe a word he said ! ' 
 
 And " ' Dust thou art to dust returning,' ne'er was spoke of human soul " 
 The SCifi cries, 'tis well for him that hath such gift to ask its goal. 
 
 " And this is all, for this we're born to weep a little and to die ! " 
 So sings the shallow bard whose life still labours at the letter "I." 
 
 " Ear never heard, Eye never saw the bliss of those who enter in 
 My heavenly kingdom^" Is^ said, who wailed our sorrows and our sin: 
 
 Too much of words or yet too few! What to thy Godhead easier than 
 One little glimpse of Paradise to ope the eyes and ears of man? 
 
 " I am the Truth ! I am the Truth ! " we hear the God-drunk gnostic cry 
 " The microcosm abides in ME ; Eternal Allah's nought but I ! " 
 
 Mansfir" was wise, but wiser they who smote him with the hurl&d stones; 
 And, though his blood a witness bore, no wisdom-might could mend his bones. 
 
 " Eat, drink, and sport ; the rest of life's not worth a fillip," quoth the King ; 
 Methinks the saying saith too much : the swine would say the self-same thing ! 
 
 Two-footed beasts that browse through life, by Death to serve as soil design'd, 
 Bow prone to Earth whereof they be, and there the proper pleasures find: 
 
 But you of finer, nobler stuff, ye, whom to Higher leads the High, 
 
 What binds your hearts in common bond with creatures of the stall and sty? 
 
 "In certain hope of Life-to-come I journey through this shifting scene" 
 The Zahid ' snarls and saunters down his Vale of Tears with confi'dent mien. 
 
 Wiser than Amrin's Son^ art thou, who ken'st so well the world-to-be, 
 The Future when the Past is not, the Present merest dreamery; 
 
 I Omar-i-Khayyam, the tent-maker poet of Persia. 2 A famous Mystic stoned for blasphemy. 
 3 The " Philister" of "respectable" belief. 4 Moses in the Koran. 
 
THE KASlDAH 4 
 
 What know'st thou, man, of Life ? and yet, for ever twixt the womb, the grave. 
 Thou pratest of the Coming Life, of Heav'n and Hell thou fain must rave." 
 
 The world is old and thou art yoimg; the world is large and thou art small; 
 Cease, atom of a moment's span, to hold thyself an AU-in-AU! 
 
 * sit * :|; -Jf s|; * 
 
 Fie, fie! you visionary things, ye motes that dance in sunny glow. 
 Who base and build Eternities on briefest moment here below; 
 
 Who pass through Life like cagfed birds, the captives of a despot will; 
 
 Still wond'ring How and When and Why, and Whence and Whither, wond'ring still ; 
 
 Still wond'ring how the Marvel came because two coupling mammals chose 
 To slake the thirst. of fleshly love, and thus the "Immortal Being" rose; 
 
 Wond'ring the Babe with staring eyes, perforce compel'd from night to day, 
 Gript in the giant grasp of Life like gale-borne dust or wind-wrimg spray; 
 
 Who comes imbecile to the world 'mid double danger, groans, and tears ; 
 The toy, the sport, the waif and stray of passions, error, wrath and fears; 
 
 Who knows not Whence he came nor Why, who kens not Whither bound and When, 
 Yet such is Allah's choicest gift, the blessing dreamt by fooUsh men ; 
 
 Who step by step perforce returns to couthless youth, wan, white and cold. 
 Lisping again his broken words till all the tale be fully told : 
 
 Wond'ring the Babe with quenched orbs, an oldster bow'd by burthening years. 
 How 'scaped the skiff an himdred storms ; how 'scaped the thread a thousand shears ; 
 
 How coming to the Feast unbid, he found the gorgeous table spread 
 
 With the fair seeming Sodom-fruit, with stones that bear the shape of bread ; 
 
 How Life was nought but ray of sun that clove the darkness thick and blind. 
 The ravings of the reckless storm, the shrieking of the rav'ening wind ; 
 
 How lovely visions 'guiled his sleep, aye fading with the break of morn, 
 Till every sweet became a sour, till every rose became a thorn; 
 
 Till dust and ashes met his eyes wherever turned their saddened gaze; 
 The wrecks of joys and hopes and loves, the rubbish of his wasted days ; 
 
THE KASfDAH 5 
 
 How every high heroic Thought that longed to breathe empyrean air, 
 Failed of its feathers, fell to earth, and perisht of a sheer despair ; 
 
 How, dower'd with heritage of brain, whose might has split the solar ray, 
 His rest is grossest coarsest earth, a crown of gold on brow of clay ; 
 
 This house whose fame be flesh and bone, mortar'd with blood and faced with skin, 
 The home of sickness, dolours, age ; unclean without, impure within : 
 
 Sans ray to cheer its inner gloom, the chambers haunted by the Ghost, 
 Darkness his name, a cold dumb Shade stronger than all the heav'nly host. 
 
 This tube, an enigmatic pipe, whose end was laid before begun. 
 
 That lengthens, broadens, shrinks and breaks ; — puzzle, machine, automaton ; 
 
 The first of Pots the Potter made by Chrysorrhoas' blue-green wave;' 
 Methinks I see him smile to see what guerdon to the world he gave! 
 
 How Life is dim, unreal, vain, like scenes that round the drunkard reel ; 
 How "Being" meaneth not to be; to see and hear, smell, taste and feel. 
 
 A drop in Ocean's boundless tide, unfathom'd waste of agony; 
 Where millions live their horrid lives by making other millions die. 
 
 How with a heart that would through love, to Universal Love aspire, 
 Man woos infernal chance to smite, as Min'arets draw the Thunder-fire. 
 
 How Earth on Earth builds tow'er and wall, to crumble at a touch of Time; 
 How Earth on Earth from Shinar-plain the heights of Heaven fain would climb. 
 
 How short this Life, how long withal ; how false its weal, how true its woes. 
 This fever-fit with paroxysms to mark its opening and its close. 
 
 Ah ! gay the day with shine of sun, and bright the breeze, and blithe the throng 
 Met on the River-bank to play, when I was young, when I was young : 
 
 Such general joy could never fade ; and yet the chilling whisper came 
 
 One face had paled, one form had failed ; had fled the bank, had swum the stream ; 
 
 Still revellers danced, and sang, and trod the hither bank of Time's deep tide, 
 Still one by one they left and fared to the far misty thither side ; 
 
 I The Abana, River of Damascus. 
 
THE KAStDAH 6 
 
 And now the last hath slipt away yon drear Death-desert to explore, 
 And now one Pilgrim worn and lorn still lingers on the lonely shore. 
 
 Yes, Life in youth-tide standeth still ; in Manhood streameth soft and slow 
 See, as it nears the 'abysmal goal how fleet the waters flash and flow ! 
 
 And Deaths are twain ; the Deaths we see drop like the leaves in windy Fall ; 
 But ours, our own, are ruined worlds, a globe collapst, last end of all. 
 
 We live our lives with rogues and fools, dead and alive, alive and dead. 
 
 We die 'twixt one who feels the pulse and one who frets and clouds the head: 
 
 And, — oh, the Pity ! — hardly conned the lesson comes its fatal term ; 
 Fate bids us bundle up our books, and bear them bod'ily to the worm : 
 
 Hardly we learn to wield the blade before the wrist grows stiff and old ; 
 Hardly we learn to ply the pen ere Thought and Fancy faint with cold : 
 
 Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the Self, forget the " I," 
 When sad suspicion grips the heart, when Man, the Man, begins to die : 
 
 Hardly we scale the wisdom-heights, and sight the Pisgah-scene around. 
 
 And breathe the breath of heav'enly air, and hear the Spheres' harmonious sound ; 
 
 When swift the Camel-rider spans the howling waste, by Kismet sped. 
 And of his Magic Wand a wave hurries the quick to join the dead.' 
 
 How sore the burden, strange the strife ; how full of splendour, wonder, fear ; 
 Life, atom of that Infinite Space that stretcheth 'twixt the Here and There. 
 
 How Thought is imp'otent to divine the secret which the gods defend, 
 The Why of birth and life and death, that Isis-veil no hand may rend. 
 
 Eternal Morrows make our Day; our Is is aye to be till when 
 
 Night closes in ; 'tis all a dream, and yet we die, — and then and THEN ? 
 
 And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man 
 \Veaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan. 
 
 I Death in Arabia rides a Camel, not a pale horse. 
 
THE KAStDAH 7 
 
 Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the storm of tears and blood, 
 Man say Thy mercy made what is, and saw the made and said 'twas good? 
 
 The marvel is that man can smile dreaming his ghostly ghastly dream; — 
 Better the heedless atomy that buzzes in the morning beam ! 
 
 O the dread pathos of our lives ! how durst thou, Allah, thus to play 
 With Love, Affection, Friendship, all that shows the god in mortal clay? 
 
 But ah ! what 'vaileth man to mourn ; shall tears bring forth what smiles ne'er brought ; 
 Shall brooding breed a thought of joy ? Ah hush the sigh, forget the thought ! 
 
 Silence thine immemorial quest, contain thy nature's vain complaint 
 
 None heeds, none cares for thee or thine ; — like thee how many came and went ? 
 
 Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail ; enjoy thy shining hour of sun ; 
 We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less fuU of fun ? 
 
 V V 'i' *!- n' V T* 
 
 What Truths hath gleaned that Sage consumed by many a moon that waxt and waned ? 
 What Prophet-strain be his to sing ? What hath his old Experience gained ? 
 
 There is no God, no man-made God ; a bigger, stronger, crueller man ; 
 Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began. 
 
 Right quoth the Hindu Prince of old,* " An Ishwara for one I nill, 
 Th' almighty everlasting Good who cannot 'bate th' Eternal 111 : " 
 
 "Your gods may be, what shows they are?" Hear China's Perfect Sage declare^; 
 "And being, what to us be they who dwell so darkly and so far?" 
 
 "All matter hath a birth and death; 'tis made, unmade and made anew; 
 " We choose to call the Maker ' God ' : — such is the Zahid's owly view. 
 
 " You changeful finite Creatures strain " (rejoins the Drawer of the Wine) ' 
 "The dizzy depths of Infinite Power to fathom with your foot of twine"; 
 
 " Poor idols of man's heart and head with the Divine Idea to blend ; 
 
 " To preach as ' Nature's Common Course ' what any hour may shift or end." 
 
 1 Buddha. 2 Confucius. 3 The Sufi or Gnostic opposed to the Z^hid. 
 
THE KAStDAH 8 
 
 " How shall the Shown pretend to ken aught of the Showman or the Show ? 
 " Why meanly bargain to believe, which only means thou ne'er canst know ? 
 
 " How may the passing Now contain the standing Now — Eternity ? — 
 " An endless is without a was, the le and never the to-be ? 
 
 " Who made your Maker ? If Self-made, why fare so far to fare the worse 
 " Sufificeth not a world of worlds, a self-made chain of universe ? 
 
 " Grant an Idea, Primal Cause, the Causing Cause, why crave for more ? 
 "Why strive its depth and breadth to mete, to trace its work, its aid to 'implore? 
 
 " Unknown, Incomprehensible, whate'er you choose to call it, call ; 
 " But leave it vague as airy space, dark in its darkness mystical. 
 
 " Your childish fears would seek a Sire, by the non-human God defin'd, 
 "What your five wits may wot ye weet; what is you please to dub 'design'd;' 
 
 " You bring down Heav'en to vulgar Earth; your Maker like yourselves you make, 
 " You quake to own a reign of Law, you pray the Law its laws to break ; 
 
 " You pray, but hath your thought e'er weighed how empty vain the prayer must be, 
 " That begs a boon already giv'en, or craves a change of Law to see ? 
 
 " Say, Man, deep learned in the Scheme that orders mysteries sublime, 
 " How came it this was Jesus, that was Judas from the birth of Time ? 
 
 " How I the tiger, thou the lamb; again the Secret, prithee, show 
 
 "Who slew the slain, bowman or bolt or Fate that drave the man, the bow? 
 
 " Man worships self; his God is Man ; the struggling of the mortal mind 
 "To form its model as 'twould be, the perfect of itself to find. 
 
 " The God became sage, priest and scribe where Nilus' serpent made the vale ; 
 " A gloomy Brahm in glowing Ind, a neutral something cold and pale : 
 
 " Amid the high Chaldean hills a moulder of the heavenly spheres ; 
 "On Guebre steppes the Timeless-God who governs by his dual peers: 
 
 " In Hebrew tents the Lord that led His leprous slaves to fight and jar ; 
 " Yahveh,' Adon or Elohim, the God that smites, the JVTan of War. 
 
 I Jehovah. 
 
THE KASlDAH 9 
 
 " The lovely Gods of lib'ertine Greece, those fair and frail humanities 
 
 " Whose homes o'erlook'd the Middle Sea, where all Earth's beauty cradled Ues, 
 
 " Ne'er left its bless&d bounds, nor sought the barb'arous climes of barb'arous gods 
 " Where Odin of the dreary North o'er hog and sickly mead-cup nods : 
 
 "And when, at length, 'Great Pan is dead' uprose the loud and dol'orous cry 
 " A glamour wither'd on the ground, a splendour faded in the sky. 
 
 " Yea, Pan was dead, the Nazar'ene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, 
 " The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three and three is one ; 
 
 " Whose sadd'ening creed of herited Sin spilt o'er the world its cold grey spell ; 
 " In every vista showed a grave^ and 'neath the grave the glare of Hell; 
 
 " Till all Life's Po'esy sinks to prose ; romance to dull Real'ity fades ; 
 
 " Earth's flush of gladness pales in gloom and God again to man degrades. 
 
 " Then the lank Arab foul with sweat, the drainer of the camel's dug, 
 " Gorged with his leek-green lizard's meat, clad in his filthy rag and rug, 
 
 " Bore his fierce Allah o'er his sands and broke, like lava-burst upon 
 
 " The realms where reigned pre- Adamite Kings, where rose the grand Kayinian throne.' 
 
 " Who now of ancient Kayomurs, of Zil or Rustam cares to sing, 
 
 " Whelmed by the tempest of the tribes that called the Camel-driver King ? 
 
 " Where are the crown of Kay Khusraw, the sceptre of Anfishirwin 
 
 " The holy grail of high Jamshid, Afrisiyab's hall ? — Canst tell me, man ? 
 
 " Gone, gone, where I and thou must go, borne by the winnowing wings of Death, 
 " The Horror brooding over life, and nearer brought with every breath : 
 
 " Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes, they rose and reigned, they fought and fell, 
 "As swells and swoons across the wold the tinkling of the Camel's bell. 
 
 There is no Good, there is no Bad ; these be the whims of mortal will : 
 What works me weal that call I ' good,' what harms and hurts I hold as ' ill ' : 
 
 I Kay^ni — of the race of Cyrus ; old Guebre heroes. 
 
THE KAStDAH lo 
 
 They change with place, they shift with race ; and, in the veriest span of Time, 
 Each Vice has worn a Virtue's crown ; all Good was banned as Sin or Crime : 
 
 Like ravelled skeins they cross and twine, while this with that connects and blends ; 
 And only Khizr' his eye shall see where one begins, where other ends : 
 
 What mortal shall consort with Khizr, when Musi turned in fear to flee ? 
 What man foresees the flow'er or fruit whom Fate compels to plant the tree ? 
 
 For Man's Free-will immortal Law, Anagkd, Kismet, Des'tiny read 
 
 That was, that is, that aye shall be. Star, Fortune, Fate, Urd, Norn, or Need. 
 
 " Man's nat'ural State is God's design " ; such is the silly sage's theme ; 
 " Man's primal Age was Age of Gold"; such is the Poet's waking dream: 
 
 belusion, Ign'orance ! Long ere man drew upon Earth his earli'est breath 
 The world was one contin'uous scene of anguish, torture, prey and Death; 
 
 Where hideous Theria of the wild rended their fellows limb by limb ; 
 Where horrid Saurians of the sea in waves of blood were wont to swim : 
 
 The " fair young Earth " was only fit to spawn her frightful monster-brood ; 
 Now fiery hot, now icy frore, now reeking wet with steamy flood. 
 
 Yon glorious Sun, the greater light, the "Bridegroom" of the royal Lyre, 
 A flaming, boiling, bursting mine ; a grim black orb of whirhng fire : 
 
 That gentle Moon, the lesser light, the Lover's lamp, the Swain's delight, 
 A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse upon the road of night. 
 
 What reckt he, say, of Good or 111 who in the hill-hole made his lair, 
 The blood-fed rav'ening Beast of prey, wilder than wildest wolf or bear ? 
 
 How long in Man's pre-Ad'amite days to feed and swill, to sleep and breed. 
 Were the Brute-biped's only life, a perfect life sans Code or Creed ? 
 
 His choicest garb a shaggy fell, his choicest tool a flake of stone ; 
 
 His best of orn'aments tattoo'd skin and holes to hang his bits of bone ; 
 
 I Supposed to be the Prophet Elijah. 
 
THE KAStDAH ii 
 
 Who fought for female as for food when Mays awoke to warm desire; 
 And such the Lust that grew to Love when Fancy lent a purer fire. 
 
 Where then " Th' Eternal nature-law by God engraved on human heart " ? 
 Behold his simiad sconce and own the Thing could play no higher part. 
 
 Yet, as long ages rolled, he learnt from Beaver, Ape and Ant to build 
 Shelter for sire and dam and brood, from blast and blaze that hurt and killed ; 
 
 And last came Fire ; when scrap of stone cast on the flame that lit his den, 
 Gave out the shining ore, and made the Lord of beasts a Lord of men. 
 
 The " moral sense," your Zihid-phrase, is but the gift of latest years ; 
 Conscience was born when man had shed his fur, his tail, his pointed ears. 
 
 What conscience has the murd'erous Moor, who slays his guest with felon blow, 
 Save sorrow he can slay no more, what prick of pen'itence can he know ? 
 
 You cry the " Cruelty of Things " is myst'ery to your purblind eye. 
 Which fixed upon a point in space the general project passes by : 
 
 For see ! the Mammoth went his ways, became a mem'ory and a name ; 
 While the half-reasoner with the hand^ survives his rank and place to claim. 
 
 Earthquake and plague, storm, fight and fray, portents and curses man must deem 
 Since he regrets his self alone, nor cares to trace the scope, the scheme ; 
 
 The Quake that comes in eyehd's beat to ruin, level, 'gulf and kiU, 
 Builds up a world for better use, to general Good bends special 111 : 
 
 The dreadest sound man's ear can hear, the war and rush of stormy Wind 
 Depures the stuff of human Ufe, breeds health and strength for humankind : 
 
 What call ye them or Goods or Ills, ill-goods, good-ills, a loss, a gain. 
 When realms arise and falls a roof; a world is won, and man is slain? 
 
 And thus the race of Being runs, till haply in the time to be 
 
 Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari^-men another falling star shall see : 
 
 I The Elephant. 2 The Planet Jupiter. 
 
THE KAStDAH 12 
 
 Shall see it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone no Thought can tell,- 
 Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the tinkling of the camel-bell ! 
 
 All Faith is false, all Faith is true : Truth is the shattered mirror strown 
 In myriad bits ; while each believes his little bit the whole to own. 
 
 What is the Truth? was askt of yore. Reply all object Truth is one 
 As twain of halves aye makes a whole; the moral Truth for all is none. 
 
 Ye scantly-learned Z&hids learn from Aflatun and Arist<i,' 
 
 While Truth is real like your good : th' Untrue, like ill, is real too ; 
 
 As palace mirror'd in the stream, as vapour mingled with the skies. 
 So weaves the brain pi mortal man the tangled web of Truth and Lies. 
 
 What see we here ? Forms, nothing more ! Forms fill the brightest strongest eye, 
 We know not substance ; 'mid the shades shadows ourselves we live and die. 
 
 " Faith mountains moves " I hear : I see the practice of the world unheed 
 The foolish vaunt, the blatant boast that serves our vanity to feed. 
 
 " Faith stands unmoved " ; and why ? Because man's silly fancies still remain. 
 And will remain till wiser man the day-dreams of his youth disdain. 
 
 " 'Tis blessed to believe " ; you say : The saying may be true enow 
 An it can add to Life a light : — only remains to show us how. 
 
 E'en if I could I nould believe your tales and fables stale and trite. 
 Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires the dulled ear of drowsy wight. 
 
 With God's foreknowledge man's free will ! what monster-growth of himian brain, 
 What pow'ers of light shall ever pierce this puzzle dense with words inane? 
 
 Vainly the heart on Providence calls, such aid to seek were hardly wise 
 
 For man must own the pitiless Law that sways the globe and sevenfold skies. 
 
 " Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav'en, come pay the priest that holds the key ; " 
 So spake, and Speaks, and aye shall speak the last to enter Heaven, — he. 
 
 I Plato and Aristotle. 
 
THE KASlDAH 13 
 
 Are these the words for men to hear ? yet such the Church's general tongue, 
 The horseleech-cry so strong so high her heav'enward Psalms and Hymns among. 
 
 What ? Faith a merit and a claim, when with the brain 'tis born and bred ? 
 Go, fool, thy foolish way and dip in holy water buried dead ! ' 
 
 Yet follow not th' unwisdom-path, cleave not to this and that disclaim; 
 Believe in all that man believes; here all and naught are both the same. 
 
 But is it so? How may we know? Haply this Fate, this Law may be 
 A word, a sound, a breath ; at most the Zahid's moonstruck theory. 
 
 Yes Truth may be, but 'tis not Here ; mankind must seek and find it There, 
 But Where nor I nor you can tell, nor aught earth-mother ever bare. 
 
 Enough to think that Truth can be : come sit we where the roses glow, 
 Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to 'unknow. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Man hath no Soul, a state of things, a no-thing still, a sound, a word 
 Which so begets substantial thing that eye shall see what ear hath heard. 
 
 Where was his Soul the savage beast which in primeval forests strayed. 
 What shape had it, what dwelling-place, what part in nature's plan it played? 
 
 This Soul to ree a riddle made ; who wants the vain duality ? 
 
 Is not myself enough for me ? what need of " I " within an " I " ? 
 
 Words, words that gender things ! The soul is a new-comer on the scene ; 
 Sufficeth not the breath of Life to work the matter-born machine ? 
 
 I I think he is alluding, though he has not expressed it, to the Marcionites' heresy of 
 baptizing for the dead. The Marcionites were heretics who lived at Sinope, a.d. 150. Marcian 
 came to Rome and believed in principles similar to the Manichseans. When a. man died, one 
 of the Marcionites sat on his coffin, and another asked him if he were willing to be baptized, 
 and he answered, " Yes," upon which he was baptized. These heretics quoted Paul (i Cor. 
 XV., 29), " Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise at 
 all? Why are they then baptized for the dead? " Dr. E. Berdoe says "that this line has no 
 reference to the Marcionite heresy at all, but to Holy baptism, wherein we are buried with 
 Christ. The reference is manifestly to Romans vi., 4, 'Therefore we are buried with him by 
 baptism into death,' and the following context." — Isabel Burton. 
 
 4 
 
THE KAStDAH 14 
 
 We know the Gen'esis of the Soul ; we trace the Soul to hour of birth ; 
 We mark its growth as grew mankind to boast himself sole Lord of Earth : 
 
 The race of Be'ing from dawn of Life in an unbroken course was run ; 
 What men are pleased to call their Souls was in the hog and dog begun: 
 
 Life is a ladder infinite-stepped, that hides its rungs from human eyes ; 
 Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above the skies: 
 
 No break the chain of Being bears ; all things began in unity ; 
 
 And lie the links in regular line though haply none the sequence see. 
 
 The Ghost, embodied natural Dread of dreary death and foul decay. 
 Begat the Spirit, Soul and Shade with Hades' pale and wan array. 
 
 The Soul required a greater Soul, a Soul of Souls, to rule the host ; 
 Hence spirit-powers and hierarchies, all gendered by the savage Ghost. 
 
 Not yours, ye Peoples of the Book, these fairy visions fair and fond, 
 Got by the gods of Khemi-land* and faring far the seas beyond ! 
 
 " Th' immortal mind of mortal man ! " we hear yon loud-lunged Zealot cry ; 
 Whose mind but means his sum of thought, an essence of atomic " L" 
 
 Thought is the work of brain and nerve, in small-skulled idiot poor and mean ; 
 In sickness sick, in sleep asleep, and dead when Death lets drop the scene. 
 
 " Tush ! " quoth the Zahid, " well we ken the teaching of the school abhorr'd 
 " That maketh man automaton, mind a secretion, soul a word." 
 
 " Of molecules and protoplasm you matter-mongers prompt to prate ; 
 " Of jelly-speck, development and apes that grew to man's estate." 
 
 Vain cavil ! all that is hath come either by Mir'acle or by Law ; — 
 
 Why waste on this your hate and fear, why waste on that your love and awe ? 
 
 Why heap such hatred on a word, why " Prototype " to type assign, 
 Why upon matter spirit mass? wants an appendix your design? 
 
 I Egypt ; Kam, Kem, Khem (hierogl.), in the Demotic Khemi. 
 
THE KASlDAH 15 
 
 Is not the highest honour his who from the worst hath drawn the best ; 
 May not your Maker make the world from matter, an it suit His hest ? 
 
 Nay more, the sordider the stuff the cimninger the workman's hand : 
 Cease, then, your own Almighty Power to bind, to bound, to understand. 
 
 " Reason and Instinct ! " How we love to play with words that please our pride ; 
 Our noble race's mean descent by false forged titles seek to hide ! 
 
 For " gift divine " I bid you read the better work of higher brain. 
 From instinct differing in degree as golden mine from leaden vein. 
 
 Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue : 
 Worlds lie above, beyond its ken ; what crosses it can ne'er be true. 
 
 "Fools rush where Angels fear to tread!" Angels and Fools have equal claim 
 To do what Nature bids them do, sans hope of praise, sans fear of blame ! 
 
 sC !|s * * * * ;;: 
 
 There is no Heav'en, there is no Hell; these be the dreams of baby minds; 
 Tools of the wily Fetisheer, to 'fright the fools his cunning blinds. 
 
 Learn from the mighty Spi'rits of old to set thy foot on Heav'en and Hell ; 
 In Life to find thy hell and heav'en as thou abuse or use it well. 
 
 So deemed the doughty Jew who dared by studied silence low to lay 
 Orcus and Hades, lands of shades, the gloomy night of human day. 
 
 Hard to the heart is final death: fain would an Ens not end in Nil ; 
 Love made the senti'ment kindly good: the Priest perverted all to ill. 
 
 While Reason sternly bids us die. Love longs for life beyond the grave: 
 Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears for Life-to-be shall ever crave. 
 
 Hence came the despot's darling dream, a Church to rule and sway the State ; 
 Hence sprang the train of countless griefs in priestly sway and rule innate. 
 
 For future Life who dares reply? No witness at the bar have we; 
 Save what the brother Potsherd tells,— old tales and novel jugglery. 
 
THE KAStDAH i6 
 
 Who e'er return'd to teach the Truth, the things of Heaven and Hell to limn? 
 And all we hear is only fit for grandam-talk and nursery hymn. 
 
 " Have mercy, man ! " the Z^hid cries, " of our best visions rob us not ! 
 " Mankind a future life must have to balance life's unequal lot." 
 
 "Nay," quoth the Magian "'tis not so; I draw my wine for one and all, 
 A cup for this, a score for that, e'en as his measure's great or small : 
 
 " Who drinks one bowl hath scant delight ; to poorest passion he was born ; 
 " Who drains the score must e'er expect to rue the headache of the mom." 
 
 Safely he jogs along the way which ' Golden Mean ' the sages call ; 
 Who scales the brow of frowning Alp must face full many a slip and fall. 
 
 Here Extremes meet, anointed Kings whose crowned heads uneasy lie, 
 Whose cup of joy contains no more than tramps that on the dunghill die. 
 
 To fate-doomed Sinner born and bred for dangling from the gallows-tree; 
 To Saint who spends his holy days in rapt'urous hope his God to see; 
 
 To all that breathe our upper air the hands of Dest'iny ever deal, 
 
 In fixed and equal parts, their shares of joy and sorrow, woe and weal. 
 
 " How comes it, then, our span of days in hunting wealth and fame we spend 
 " Why strive we (and all humans strive) for vain and visionary end ? " 
 
 Reply ; mankind obeys a law that bids him labour, struggle, strain ; 
 The Sage well knowing its unworth, the Fool a-dreaming foolish gain. 
 
 And who, 'mid e'en the Fools, but feels that half the joy is in the race 
 
 For wealth and fame and place, nor sighs when comes success to crown the chase ? 
 
 Again : In Hind, Chin, Franguestan that accident of birth befell. 
 Without our choice, our will, our voice : Faith is an accident as well. 
 
 What to the Hindu saith the Frank : " Denier of the Laws divine ! 
 However godly-good thy Life, Hell is the home for thee and thine." 
 
THE KAStDAH 17 
 
 " Go strain the draught before 'tis drunk, and learn that breathing every breath, 
 " With every step, with every gest, some thing of life thou do'est to death." 
 
 Replies the Hindu : " Wend thy way for foul and foolish Mlenchhas fit ; 
 
 " Your Pariah-par'adise woo and win ; at such dog-Heav'en I laugh and spit. 
 
 " Cannibals of the Holy Cow ! who make your rav'ening maws the grave 
 
 " Of Things with self-same right to live ; — what Fiend the filthy license gave ? " 
 
 What to the Moslem cries the Frank ? " A polygamic Theist thou ! 
 " From an imposter- Prophet turn ; thy stubborn head to Jesus bow." 
 
 Rejoins the Moslem : " Allah's one tho' with four Moslemahs I wive, 
 
 " One-wife-men ye and (damn&d race !) you split your God to Three and Five." 
 
 The Buddhist to Confucians thus : " Like dogs ye live, like dogs ye die ; 
 " Content ye rest with wretched earth ; God, Judgment, Hell ye fain defy." 
 
 Retorts the Tartar : " Shall I lend mine only ready-money ' now,' 
 " For vain usurious ' Then ' like thine, avaunt, a triple idiot Thou ! " 
 
 " With this poor life, with this mean world I fain complete what in me lies ; 
 " I strive to perfect this my me ; my sole ambition's to be wise." 
 
 When doctors differ who decides amid the milliard-headed throng ? 
 
 Who save the madman dares to cry : " 'Tis I am right, you all are wrong ? " 
 
 "You all are right, you all are wrong,'' we hear the careless Sufi say, 
 " For each believes his gUmm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day." 
 
 " Thy faith why false, my faith why true ? 'tis all the work of Thine and Mine, 
 " The fond and foolish love of self that makes the Mine excel the Thine." 
 
 Cease then to mumble rotten bones; and strive to clothe with flesh and blood 
 The skel'eton ; and to shape a Form that all shall hail as fair and good. 
 
 "For gen'erous youth," an Arab saith, "Jahim's' the only genial state; 
 " Give us the fire but not the shame with the sad, sorry blest to mate." 
 
 I Jahannam, Gehenna, Hell. 
 
THE KAStDAH i8 
 
 And if your Heav'eh and Hell be true, and Fate that forced me to be born 
 Force me to Heav'en or Hell — I go, and hold Fate's insolence in scorn. 
 
 I want not this, I want not that, already sick of Me and Thee; 
 
 And if we're both transform'd and changed, what then becomes of Thee and Me? 
 
 Enough to think such things may be: to say they are not or they are 
 Were folly : leave them all to Fate, nor wage on shadows useless war. 
 
 Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause ; 
 He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. 
 
 All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell, 
 A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell. 
 
 iH s{i )|< :{( ^ ^ >l£ 
 
 How then shall man so order life that when his tale of years is told, 
 Like sated guest he wend his way ; how shall his even tenour hold ? 
 
 Despite the Writ that stores the skull; despite the Table and the Pen'; 
 Maugre the Fate that plays us down, her board the world, her pieces men ? 
 
 How when the light and glow of life wax dim in thickly gath'ering gloom, 
 Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death, shall scorn the victory of the Tomb? 
 
 One way, two paths, one end the grave. This runs athwart the flow'ery plain, 
 That breasts the bush, the steep, the crag, in sun and wind and snow and rain : 
 
 Who treads the first must look adown, must deem his life an all in all ; 
 
 Must see no heights where man may rise, must sight no depths where man may fall. 
 
 Allah in Adam form must view ; adore the Maker in the made 
 Content to bask in Maya's smile," in joys of pain, in lights of shade. 
 
 He breaks the Law, he burns the Book, he sends the Moolah back to school ; 
 Laughs at the beards of Saintly men ; and dubs the Prophet dolt and fool. 
 
 Embraces Cypress' taper-waist ; cools feet on wavy breast of rill ; 
 Smiles in the Nargis' love-lorn eyes, and 'joys the dance of Daffodil ; 
 
 I Emblems of Kismet, or Destiny. 2 lUusion. 
 
THE KAStDAH 19 
 
 Melts in the saffron light of Dawn to hear the moaning of the Dove ; 
 Delights in Sundown's purpling hues when Bulbul woos the Rose's love. 
 
 Finds mirth and joy in Jamshid-bowl ; toys with the Daughter of the vine; 
 And bids the beauteous cup-boy say, "Master I bring thee ruby wine^!" 
 
 Sips from the maiden's lips the dew; brushes the bloom from virgin brow: — 
 Such is his fleshly bUss that strives the Maker through the Made to know. 
 
 I've tried them all, I find them all so same and tame, so drear, so dry ; 
 My gorge ariseth at the thought ; I commune with myself and cry :^ 
 
 Better the myriad toils and pains that make the man to manhood true. 
 This be the rule that guideth life ; these be the laws for me and you : 
 
 With Ignor'ance wage eternal war, to know thy self for ever strain, 
 Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane ; 
 
 That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste; that deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes 
 Creates the thing that never was, the Thing that ever is defies. 
 
 The finite Atom infinite that forms thy circle's centre-dot. 
 So full-sufficient for itself, for other selves existing not, 
 
 Finds the world mighty as 'tis small ; yet must be fought the unequal fray ; 
 A myriad giants here; and there a pinch of dust, a clod of clay. 
 
 Yes ! maugre all thy dreams of peace still must the fight imfair be fought ; 
 Where thou mayst learn the noblest lore, to know that all we know is nought. 
 
 True to thy Nature, to Thy self. Fame and Disfame nor hope nor fear : 
 Enough to thee the small still voice aye thund'ering in thine inner ear. 
 
 From self-approval seek applause : What ken not men thou kennest, thou ! 
 Spurn ev'ry idol others raise : Before thine own Ideal bow : 
 
 Be thine own Deus : Make self free, liberal as the curcling air : 
 
 Thy Thought to thee an Empire be ; break every prison'ing lock and bar : 
 
 I That all the senses, even the ear may enjoy. 
 
THE KASlDAH 20 
 
 Do thou the Ought to self aye owed; here all the duties meet and blend, 
 In widest sense, withouten care of what began, for what shall end. 
 
 Thus, as thou view the Phantom-forms which in the misty Past were thine, 
 To be again the thing thou wast with honest pride thou may'st decline ; 
 
 And, glancing down the range of years, fear not thy future self to see; 
 Resign'd to life, to death resign'd, as though the choice were nought to thee. 
 
 On Thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn from Sun and Light to gaze, 
 At darkling cloisters paved with tombs, where rot the bones of bygone days: 
 
 "Eat not thy heart," the Sages said; "nor mourn the Past, the buried Past;" 
 Do what thou dost, be strong, be brave; and, like the Star, nor rest nor haste. 
 
 Pluck the old woman from thy breast : be stout in woe, be stark in weal ; 
 Do good for Good is good to do ; Spurn bribe of Heav'en and threat of Hell. 
 
 To seek the True, to glad the heart, such is of life the HIGHER LAW, 
 Whose differ'ence is the Man's degree, the Man of gold, the Man of straw. 
 
 See not that something in Mankind that rouses hate or scorn or strife. 
 Better the worm of Izr^iP than Death that walks in form of life. 
 
 Survey thy kind as One whose wants in the great Human Whole unite"; 
 The Homo rising high from earth to seek the Heav'ens of Life-in-light; 
 
 And hold Humanity one man, whose universal agony 
 
 Still strains and strives to gain the goal, where agonies shall cease to be. 
 
 Believe in all things ; none believe; judge not nor warp by "Facts" the thought; 
 See clear, hear clear, tho' Ufe may seem M^y^ and Mirage, Dream and Naught. 
 
 Abjure the Why and seek the How : the God and gods enthroned on high, 
 Are silent all, are silent still ; nor hear thy voice, nor deign reply. 
 
 The Now, that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line 
 Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine. 
 
 I The Angel of Death. 2 The " Great Man ' of the Enochites and the Mormons. 
 
THE KASlDAH 21 
 
 Perchance the law some Giver hath : Let be ! let be ! what canst thou know 
 A myriad races came and went ; this Sphinx hath seen them come and go. 
 
 Haply the Law that rules the world allows to man the widest range ; 
 And haply Fate's a Theist-word, subject to human chance and change. 
 
 This " I " may find a future Life, a nobler copy of our own, 
 
 Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge shall be known ; 
 
 Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on Earth he sees in part ; 
 
 Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought ; nor hope defer'd shall hurt the heart. 
 
 But ! — faded flow'er and fallen leaf no more shall deck the parent tree ; 
 And man once dropt by Tree of Life what hope of other life has he ? 
 
 The shatter'd bowl shall know repair ; the riven lute shall sound once more ; 
 But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to man restore ? 
 
 The shiver'd clock again shall strike ; the broken reed shall pipe again : 
 But we, we die, and Death is one, the doom of Brutes, the doom of men. 
 
 Then, if Nirwan^^ round our life with nothingness, 'tis haply best ; 
 
 Thy toil and troubles, want and woe at length have won their guerdon — Rest. 
 
 Cease, Abdfl, Cease ! Thy song is sung, nor think the gain the singer's prize ; 
 Till men hold Ignor'ance deadly sin, till man deserves his title "Wise'": 
 
 In Days to come, Days slow to dawn, when Wisdom deigns to dwell with men. 
 These echoes of a voice long stilled haply shall wake responsive strain: 
 
 Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to tell: — 
 The whispers of the Desert-wind ; the Tinkling of the camel's-bell. 
 
 I Comparative Annihilation. 2 " Homo sapiens.' 
 
NOTES 
 
 NOTE I 
 
 HAJI ABDtr, THE MAN. 
 
 HAjt AsDt has been known to me for 
 more years than J care to record. A 
 native, it is believed, of Dardbghird in the 
 Yezd Province, he always preferred to 
 style himself Al-Hichmakdni, a facetious 
 "lackab" or surname, meaning "Of No- 
 hall, Nowhere." He had travelled far and 
 wide with his eyes open; as appears by 
 his " couplets." To a natural facility, a 
 knack of language-learning, he added a 
 store of desultory various reading ; scraps 
 of Chinese and old Egyptian; of Hebrew 
 and Syriac ; of Sanskrit and Prakrit ; of 
 Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and 
 Greek, including Romaic ; of Berber, the 
 Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian, 
 besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and 
 Arabic, the classic of the schools. Nor 
 was he ignorant of " the -ologies" and the 
 triumphs of modern scientific discovery. 
 Briefly, his memory was well-stored ; and 
 he had every talent save that of using his 
 talents. 
 
 But no one thought that he " woo'd the 
 Muse,'' to speak in the style of the last 
 century. Even his intimates were ignorant 
 of the fact that he had a skeleton in his 
 cupboard, his Kasidah or distichs. He 
 
 coniided to me his secret when we last met 
 in Western India — I am purposely vague 
 in specifying the place. When so doing 
 he held in hand the long and hoary honours 
 of his chin with the points towards me, as 
 if to say with the Island-King; 
 
 There is a touch of Winter in my beard, 
 
 A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence. 
 
 And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, 
 seemed to protest against the plea of age. 
 The MS. was in the vilest " Shikastah " or 
 running-hand ; and, as I carried it off, the 
 writer declined to take the trouble of copy- 
 ing out his cacograph. 
 
 We, his old friends, had long addressed 
 Hiji Abdu by the sobriquet of Nabbiand 
 ("our Prophet"); and the reader will see 
 that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a 
 message to deliver. He evidently aspires 
 to preach a Faith of his own ; an Eastern 
 Version of Humanitarianism blended with 
 the sceptical or, as we now say, the scientific 
 habit of mind. This religion, of which 
 Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom ; 
 Judseism, Christianity and Islamism are 
 mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted 
 by the Philosopher : it worships with single- 
 minded devotion the Holy Cause of Truth, 
 of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods 
 it may bring ; and this belief is equally 
 
THE KAStDAH 
 
 23 
 
 acceptable to honest ignorance, and to the 
 highest attainments in nature-study. 
 
 With Confucius the Hiji cultivates what 
 Strauss has called the " stem common- 
 sense of mankind " ; while the reign of order 
 is a paragraph of his " Higher Law." He 
 traces from its rudest beginnings the all 
 but absolute universality of some percep- 
 tion by man called "Faith"; that sensus 
 Numinis which, by inheritance or commu- 
 nication, is now universal except in those 
 - who force themselves to oppose it. And 
 he evidently holds this general consent of 
 mankind to be so far divine that it 
 primarily discovered for itself, if it did not 
 create, a divinity'. He does not cry with 
 the Christ of Novalis, " Children, you have 
 no father"; and perhaps he would join 
 Renan in exclaiming, Un monde sans Dieu est 
 horrible ! 
 
 But he recognizes the incompatibility of 
 the Infinite with the Definite; of a Being 
 who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an 
 Actus purus who is called jealous, wrathful 
 and revengeful, with an " Eternal that 
 makes for righteousness." In the presence 
 of the endless contradictions, which spring 
 from the idea of a Personal Deity, with the 
 Synthesis, the Begriff of Providence, our 
 Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of 
 an unknown and an unknowable. He 
 objects to the countless variety of forms 
 assumed by the perception of a Causa 
 Causans (a misnomer), and to that intel- 
 lectual adoption of general propositions, 
 capable of distinct statement but incapable 
 of proofs, which we term Belief. 
 
 He looks with impartial eye upon the 
 endless variety of systems, maintained 
 with equal confidence and self-sufficiency. 
 
 by men of equal ability and honesty. He 
 is weary of wandering over the world, and 
 of finding every petty race wedded to its 
 own opinions; claiming the monopoly of 
 Truth; holding all others to be in error, 
 and raising disputes whose violence, 
 acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio 
 to the importance of the disputed matter. 
 A peculiarly active and acute observation 
 taught him that many of these jarring 
 families, especially those of the same 
 blood, are par in the intellectual processes 
 of perception and reflection; that in the 
 business of the visible working world they 
 are confessedly by no means superior to 
 one another ; whereas in abstruse matters 
 of mere Faith, not admitting direct and 
 sensual evidence, one in a hundred will 
 claim to be right, and immodestly charge 
 the other ninety-nine with being wrong. 
 
 Thus he seeks to discover a system which 
 will prove them all right, and all wrong ; 
 which will reconcile their differences ; will 
 unite past creeds ; will account for the 
 present, and will anticipate the future with 
 a continuous and uninterrupted develop- 
 ment ; this, too, by a process, not negative 
 and distinctive, but, on the contrary, in- 
 tensely positive and constructive. I am 
 not called upon to sit in the seat of judg- 
 ment ; but I may say that it would be 
 singular if the attempt succeeded. Such 
 a system would be all-comprehensive, be- 
 cause not limited by space, time, or race ; 
 its principle would be extensive as Matter 
 itself, and, consequently, eternal. Mean- 
 while he satisfies himseK — the main point. 
 Students of metaphysics have of late 
 years defined the abuse of their science as 
 "the morphology of common opinion," 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 Contemporary investigators, they say, have 
 been too much occupied with introspection ; 
 their labours have become merely physio- 
 logico-biographical, and they have greatly 
 neglected the study of averages. For, says 
 La Rochefoucauld, // est plus aise de con- 
 nottre I'homme en general que de connoitre un 
 homme en particulier; and on so wide a 
 subject all views must be one-sided. 
 
 But this is not the fashion] of Easterns. 
 They have still to treat great questions ex 
 analogid universi instead of ex analogic 
 hominis. They must learn the basis of 
 sociology, the philosophic conviction that 
 manliind should be studied, not as a con- 
 geries of individuals, but as an organic whole. 
 Hence the Zeitgeist, or historical evolution 
 of the collective consciousness of the age, 
 despises the obsolete opinion that Society, 
 the State, is bound by the same moral 
 duties as the simple citizen. Hence, 
 too, it holds that the " spirit of man, 
 being of equal and uniform substance, 
 doth usually suppose and feign in nature 
 a greater equaUty and uniformity than is 
 in Truth." 
 
 Christianity and Islamism have been on 
 their trial for the last eighteen and twelve 
 centuries. They have been ardent in 
 proselytizing, yet they embrace only one- 
 tenth and one-twentieth of the human race. 
 Hdji Abdu would account for the tardy and 
 unsatisfactory progress of what their 
 votaries call "pure truths," by the innate 
 imperfections of the same. Both propose 
 a reward for mere belief, and a penalty for 
 simple unbelief ; rewards and punishments 
 being, by the way, very disproportionate. 
 Thus they reduce ever5i;hing to the scale 
 of a. somewhat unrefined egotism ; and 
 
 their demoralizing effects become clearer 
 every progressive age. 
 
 H4ji Abdu seeks Truth only, truth as far 
 as man, in the present phase of his de- 
 velopment, is able to comprehend it. He 
 disdains to associate utility, Uke Bacon 
 (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the High Priest of 
 the EngUsh Creed, le gros bon sens, with the 
 lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. 
 He seems to see the injury inflicted upon 
 the sum of thought by the A posteriori super- 
 stition, the worship of " facts," and the 
 deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the 
 reckless way in which Locke " freed philo- 
 sophy from the incubus of innate ideas." 
 Like Luther and the leaders of the great 
 French Revolution, he broke with the 
 Past; and he threw overboard the whole 
 cargo of human tradition. The result has 
 been an immense movement of the mind 
 which we love to call Progress, when it 
 has often been retrograde ; together with 
 a mighty development of egotism resulting 
 from the pampered sentiment of per- 
 sonality. 
 
 The Hdji regrets the excessive im- 
 portance attached to a possible future 
 state : he looks upon this as a psychical 
 stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion 
 and reaction disorder waking life. The 
 condition may appear humble and prosaic 
 to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by 
 a spiritual dram-drinking which, like the 
 physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happi- 
 ness. But he is too wise to affirm or to deny 
 the existence of another world. For life 
 beyond the grave there is no consensus of 
 mankind, no Catholic opinion held semper, 
 et ubique, et ab omnibus. The intellectual 
 faculties (perception and reflection) are 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 25 
 
 mute upon the subject : they bear no testi- 
 mony to facts ; they show no proof. Even 
 the instinctive sense of our kind is here 
 dumb. We may believe what we are 
 taught : we can Icnow nothing. He would, 
 therefore, cultivate that receptive mood 
 which, marching under the shadow of 
 mighty events, leads to the highest of 
 goals — the development of Humanity. 
 With him suspension of judgment is a 
 system. 
 
 Man has done much during the sixty- 
 eight centuries which represent his history. 
 This assumes the iirst Egyptian Empire, 
 following the pre-hJstoric, to begin with b.c. 
 5000, and to end with B.C. 3249. It was the 
 Old, as opposed to the Middle, the New, 
 and the Low : it contained the Dynasties 
 from I. to X., and it was the age of the 
 Pyramids, at once simple, solid, and 
 grand. When the praiser of the Past 
 contends that modern civilization has im- 
 proved in nothing upon Homer and 
 Herodotus, he is apt to forget that every 
 schoolboy is a miracle of learning com- 
 pared with the Cave-man and the palseo- 
 Uthic race. And, as the Past has been, so 
 shall the Future be. 
 
 The Pilgrim's view of life is that of the 
 Sufi, with the usual dash of Buddhistic 
 pessimism. The profound sorrow of 
 existence, so often sung by the dreamy 
 Eastern poet, has now passed into the 
 practical European mind. Even the light 
 Frenchman murmurs, — 
 
 Moi, moi, chaque jour courbant plus bas ma 
 tgte 
 Je passe — et refroidi sous ce soleil joyeux, 
 Je m'en irai bientSt, au milieu de la f^te, 
 Sans que rien manque au monde immense 
 et radieux. 
 
 But our Hiji is not Nihilistic in the " no- 
 nothing " sense of Hood's poem, or, as the 
 American phrases it, " There is nothing 
 new, nothing true, and it don't signify." 
 His is a healthy wail over the shortness 
 and the miseries of life, because he finds 
 all created things — 
 
 Measure the world, with " Me " immense. 
 
 He reminds us of St. Augustine (Med. 
 c. 21). "Vita h£ec, vita misera, vita caduca, 
 vita incerta, vita laboriosa, vita immunda, 
 vita domina malorum, regina superborum, 
 plena miseriis et erroribus .... Quam 
 humores tumidant, escas inflant, jejunia 
 macerant, joci dissolvunt, tristitise con- 
 sumunt ; sollicitudo coarctat, securitas 
 hebetat, divitias inflant et jactant. Pau- 
 pertas dejicit, juventus extollit, senectus 
 incurvat, importunltas frangit, maeror 
 deprimit. Et his malis omnibus mors 
 furibunda succedit." But ior furibunda the 
 Pilgrim would, perhaps, read benedicta. 
 
 With Cardinal Newman, one of the 
 glories of our age, Hdjt Abdu finds " the 
 Light of the world nothing else than the 
 Prophet's scroll, full of lamentations and 
 mourning and woe." I cannot refrain 
 from quoting all this fine passage, if it be 
 only for the sake of its lame and shallow 
 deduction. " To consider the world in its 
 length and breadth, its various history and 
 the many races of men, their starts, their 
 fortunes, their mutual alienation, their 
 conflicts, and then their ways, habits, 
 governments, forms of worship ; their 
 enterprises, their aimless courses, their 
 random achievements and acquirements, 
 the impotent conclusion of long-standing 
 facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a 
 
 7 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 26 
 
 superintending design, the blind evolution (1) 
 of what turn out to be great powers or 
 truths, the progress of things as if from 
 unreasoning elements, not towards final 
 causes; the greatness and littleness of man, 
 his far-reaching aims and short duration, 
 the curtain hung over his futurity, the 
 disappointments of life, the defeat of good, 
 the success of evil, physical pain, mental 
 anguish, the prevalence and intensity of 
 sin, the pervading idolatries, the corrup- 
 tions, the dreary hopeless irreUgion, that 
 condition of the whole race so fearfully yet 
 exactly described in the Apostle's words, 
 ' having no hope and without God in the 
 world ' — all this is a vision to dizzy and 
 appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of 
 a profound mystery which is absolutely without 
 human solution." Hence that admirable 
 writer postulates some "terrible original 
 calamity"; and thus the hateful doctrine, 
 theologically called " original sin," becomes 
 to him almost as certain as that " the 
 world exists, and as the existence of God." 
 Similarly the " Schedule of Doctrines " of 
 the most liberal Christian Church insists 
 upon human depravity, and the " absolute 
 need of the Holy Spirit's agency in man's 
 regeneration and sanctification." 
 
 But what have we here ? The " original 
 calamity " was either caused by God or 
 arose without leave of God, in either case 
 degrading God to man. It is the old 
 dilemma whose horns are the irrecon- 
 cilable attributes of goodness and omni- 
 science in the supposed Creator of sin 
 and suffering. If the one quality be pre- 
 dicable, the other cannot be predicable 
 of the same subject. Far better and wiser 
 is the essayist's poetical explanation now 
 
 apparently despised because it was the 
 fashionable doctrine of the sage bard s 
 day: — 
 
 All nature is but art • * 
 All discord harmony not understood; 
 All partial evil universal good.— (Essay 289— 
 292.) 
 
 The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine 
 Absolute Evil is impossible because it is 
 always rising up into good. He considers 
 the theory of a beneficent or maleficent 
 deity a purely sentimental fancy, con- 
 tradicted by human reason and the aspect 
 of the world. Evil is often the active form 
 of good; as F. W. Newman says, "so 
 likewise is Evil the revelation of Good." 
 With him all existences are equal : so long 
 as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life- 
 fluid or vital force, it matters not they 
 be, — 
 
 Fungus or oak or worm or man. 
 War, he says, brings about countless 
 individual miseries, but it forwards general 
 progress by raising the stronger upon the 
 ruins of the weaker races. Earthquakes 
 and cyclones ravage small areas; but the 
 former builds up earth for man's habitation, 
 and the latter renders the atmosphere fit 
 for him to breathe. Hence he echoes : 
 
 — The universal Cause 
 Acts not by partial but by general laws. 
 
 Ancillary to the churchman's immoral view 
 of " original sin" is the unscientific theory 
 that evil came into the world with Adam 
 and his seed. Let us ask what was the 
 state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, 
 when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge 
 Saurians and other monsters hved in 
 perpetual strife, in a destructiveness of 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 2^ 
 
 which we have now only the feeblest 
 examples ? What is the actual state of the 
 world of waters, where the only object of 
 life is death, where the Law of murder is 
 the Law of Development ? 
 
 Some will charge the Hdji with irrev- 
 erence, and hold him a "lieutenant of 
 Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence.'' 
 But he is not intentionally irreverent. Like 
 men of far higher strain, who deny divinely 
 the divine, he speaks the things that others 
 think and hide. With the author of 
 " Supernatural Religion," he holds that we 
 " gain infinitely more than we lose in 
 abandoning belief, in the reality of revela- 
 tion " ; and he looks forward to the day 
 when "the old tyranny shall have been 
 broken, and when the anarchy of transition 
 shall have passed away." But he is an 
 Eastern. When he repeats the Greek's 
 " Remember not to believe," he means 
 Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas 
 lead to right actions. Among the couplets 
 not translated for this eclogue is : — 
 
 Of all the safest ways of Life the safest way is 
 
 still to doubt, 
 Men win the future world with Faith, the present 
 
 world they win without. 
 
 This is the Spaniard's : — 
 
 De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es 
 duvidar ; 
 
 a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen 
 Age of Science following the Golden Age 
 of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim continues : 
 
 The sages say : I tell thee no ! with equal faith 
 
 all Faiths receive; 
 None more, none less, for Doubt is Death: 
 
 they live the most who most believe. 
 
 Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a 
 man who believes in everything equally 
 
 and generally may be said to believe in 
 nothing. It is not a simple European view 
 which makes honest Doubt worth a dozen 
 of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposi- 
 tion to the noted writer who holds that 
 the man of simple faith is worth ninety- 
 nine of those who hold only to the egotistic 
 interests of their own individuality. This 
 dark saying means (if it mean anything), 
 that the so-called moral faculties of man, 
 fancy and ideality, must lord it over the 
 perceptive and reflective powers — a simple 
 absurdity 1 It produced a Turricremata, 
 alias Torquemada, who, shedding Hoods of 
 honest tears, caused his victims to be burnt 
 alive; and an Anchieta, the Thaumaturgist 
 of Brazil, who beheaded a converted 
 heretic lest the latter by lapse from grace 
 lose his immortal soul. 
 
 But this vein of speculation, which 
 bigots brand as " Doubt, Denial, and 
 Destruction " ; this earnest religious scep- 
 ticism ; this curious inquiry, " Has the 
 universal tradition any base of fact ? " 
 this craving after the secrets and mysteries 
 of the future, the unseen, the unknown, is 
 common to all races and to every age. 
 Even amongst the Romans, whose model 
 man in Augustus' day was Horace, the 
 philosophic, the epicurean, we find Pro- 
 pertius asking ; 
 
 An Acta in miseras descendit fabula gentes 
 Et timor haud ultra quam rogus esse potest ? 
 
 To return ^ the Pilgrim's doctrines upon 
 
 the subject of conscience and repentance 
 
 will startle those who do not follow his 
 
 train of thought : 
 
 Never repent because thy will with will of Fate 
 
 be not at one: 
 Think, an thou please, before thou dost, but 
 
 never rue the deed when done. 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 28 
 
 This again is his modified fatalism. He 
 would not accept the boisterous mode of 
 cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the 
 noble British Philister — " we know we're 
 free and there's an end on it 1 " He prefers 
 Lamarck's, " The will is, in truth, never 
 free." He believes man to be a co-ordinate 
 term of Nature's great progression ; a 
 result of the inter-action of organism and 
 environment, working through cosmic sec- 
 tions of time. He views the human 
 machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending 
 upon the physical theory of life. Every 
 corporeal fact and phenomenon which, Uke 
 the tree, grows from within or without, is 
 a mere product of organization ; living 
 bodies being subject to the natural law 
 governing the lifeless and the inorganic. 
 Whilst the religionist assures us that man 
 is not a mere toy of fate, but a free agent 
 responsible to himself, with work to do and 
 duties to perform, the Hdjl, with many 
 modern schools, holds Mind to be a word 
 describing a special operation of matter ; 
 the faculties generally to be manifestations 
 of movements in the central nervous 
 system ; and every idea, even of the Deity, 
 to be a certain little pulsation of a certain 
 little mass of animal pap — the brain. 
 Thus he would not object to relationship 
 with a tailless catarrhine anthropoid ape, 
 descended from a monad or a primal 
 ascidian. 
 
 Hence he virtually says, " I came into 
 the world without having applied for or 
 having obtained permission ; nay, more, 
 without my leave being asked or given. 
 Here I find myself hand-tied by conditions, 
 and fettered by laws and circumstances, 
 in making which my voice had no part. 
 
 While in the womb I was an automaton ; 
 and death will find me a mere machine. 
 Therefore not I, but the Law, or, if you 
 please, the Lawgiver, is answerable for all 
 my actions." Let me here observe that to 
 the Western mind " Law " postulates a 
 Lawgiver; not so to the Eastern, and 
 especially to the Sufi, who holds these 
 ideas to be human, unjustifiably extended 
 to interpreting the non-human, which men 
 call the Divine. 
 
 Further he would say, " I am an in- 
 dividual (qui nil habit dividui), a circle 
 touching and intersecting my neighbours 
 at certain points, but nowhere corre- 
 sponding, nowhere blending. Physically I 
 am not identical in all points with other 
 men. Morally I differ from them : in 
 nothing do the approaches of knowledge, 
 my five organs of sense (with their 
 Shelleyan 'interpenetration'), exactly re- 
 semble those of any other being. Ergo, 
 the effect of the world, of life, of natural 
 objects, will not in my case be the same as 
 with the beings most resembling me. Thus 
 I claim the right of creating or modifying 
 for my own and private use, the system 
 which most imports me ; and if the 
 reasonable leave be refused to me, I take 
 it without leave. 
 
 " But my individuality, however all- 
 sufficient for myself, is an infinitesimal 
 point, an atom subject in all things to 
 the Law of Storms called Life. I feel, I 
 know that Fate is. But I cannot know 
 what is or what is not fated to befall me. 
 Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as 
 an individual lies my highest, and indeed 
 my only duty, the ' I ' being duly blended 
 with the ' We.' I object to be a ' self- 
 
THE K AS to AH 
 
 29 
 
 less man,' which to me denotes an inverted 
 moral sense. I am bound to take careful 
 thought concerning the consequences of 
 every word and deed. When, however, 
 the Future has become the Past, it would 
 be the merest vanity for me to grieve or to 
 repent over that which was decreed by 
 universal Law." 
 
 The usual objection is that of man's 
 practice. It says, " This is well in theory ; 
 but how carry it out ? For instance, why 
 would you kill, or give over to be killed, 
 the man compelled by Fate to kill your 
 father?" Hiji Abdil replies, "I do as 
 others do, not because the murder was 
 done by him, but because the murderer 
 should not be allowed another chance of 
 murdering. He is a tiger who has tasted 
 blood and who should be shot. I am con- 
 vinced that he was a tool in the hands of 
 Fate, but that will not prevent my taking 
 measures, whether predestined or not, in 
 order to prevent his being similarly used 
 again." 
 
 As with repentance so with conscience. 
 Conscience may be a " fear which is the 
 shadow of justice " ; even as pity is the 
 shadow of love. Though simply a geo- 
 graphical and chronological accident, 
 which changes with every age of the 
 world, it may deter men from seeking and 
 securing the prize of successful villany. 
 But this incentive to beneficence must be 
 applied to actions that will be done, not to 
 deeds that have been done. 
 
 The Hdji, moreover, carefully distin- 
 guishes between the working of fate under 
 a personal God, and under the Reign of 
 Law. In the former case the contradiction 
 between the foreknowledge of a Creator, 
 
 and the free-will of a Creature, is direct, 
 palpable, absolute. We might as well talk 
 of black-whiteness and of white-blackness. 
 A hundred generations of divines have 
 never been able to ree the riddle ; a million 
 will fail. The difficulty is insurmountable 
 to the Theist whose Almighty is perforce 
 Omniscient, and as Omniscient, Prescient. 
 But it disappears when we convert the 
 Person into Law, or a settled order of 
 events ; subject, moreover, to certain 
 exceptions fixed and immutable, but at 
 present unknown to man. The difference 
 is essential as that between the penal code 
 with its narrow forbiddal, and the broad 
 commandment which is a guide rather than 
 a task-master. 
 
 Thus, too, the belief in fixed Law, versus 
 arbitrary will, modifies the Hiji's opinions 
 concerning the pursuit of happiness. Man- 
 kind, das rastlose Ursachenthier, is born to 
 be on the whole equally happy and 
 miserable. The highest organisms, the 
 fine porcelain of our family, enjoy the most 
 and suffer the most : they have a capacity 
 for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and 
 for plunging deep into the swift-flowing 
 river of woe and pain. Thus Dante 
 (Inf. vi. 106) : 
 
 — tua scienza 
 Che vuol, quanto la cosa e pii perfetta 
 Pill senta '1 bene, e cosi la dogllenza. 
 
 So Buddhism declares that existence in 
 itself implies effort, pain and sorrow ; and, 
 the higher the creature, the more it suffers. 
 The common clay enjoys little and suffers 
 little. Sum up the whole and distribute 
 the mass : the result will be an average ; 
 and the beggar is, on the whole, happy as 
 the prince. Why, then, asks the objector. 
 
THE KAStDAH 
 
 30 
 
 does man ever strive and struggle to change, 
 to rise ; a struggle which involves the idea 
 of improving his condition? The Hiji 
 answers, " Because such is the Law under 
 which man is born : it may be fierce as 
 famine, cruel as the grave, but man must 
 obey it with blind obedience." He does 
 not enter into the question whether life is 
 worth living, whether man should elect to 
 be born. Yet his Eastern pessimism, which 
 contrasts so sharply with the optimism of 
 the West, re-echoes the lines : 
 
 — a life, 
 With large results 90 little rife, 
 Though bearable seems hardly worth 
 This pomp of words, this pain of birth. 
 
 Life, whatever may be its consequence, 
 is built upon a basis of sorrow. Literature, 
 the voice of humanity, and the verdict of 
 mankind proclaim that all existence is a 
 state of sadness. The " physicians of the 
 Soul " would save her melancholy from 
 degenerating into despair by doses of stead- 
 fast behef in the presence of God, in the 
 assurance of Immortality, and in visions of 
 the final victory of good. Were H4ji 
 AbdA a mere Theologist, he would add that 
 sin, not the possibility of revolt, but the 
 revolt itself against conscience, is the pri- 
 mary form of evil, because it produces 
 error, moral and intellectual. This man, 
 who omits to read the Conscience-law, how- 
 ever it may differ from the Society-law, 
 is guilty of negligence. That man, who 
 obscures the light of Nature with sophistries, 
 becomes incapable of discerning his own 
 truths. In both cases error, deliberately 
 adopted, is succeeded by suffering which, 
 we are told, comes in justice and bene- 
 
 volence as a warning, a remedy, and a 
 chastisement. 
 
 But the Pilgrim is dissatisfied with the 
 idea that evil originates in the individual 
 actions of free agents, ourselves and others. 
 This doctrine fails to account for its char- 
 acteristics — essentiality and universality. 
 That creatures endowed with the mere 
 possibility of Uberty should not always 
 choose the Good appears natural. But 
 that of the milliards of human beings who 
 have inhabited Earth, not one should have 
 been found invariably to choose Good, 
 proves how insufficient is the solution. 
 Hence no one believes in the existence of 
 the complete man under the present state 
 of things. The Hdjt rejects all popular 
 and mythical explanation by the Fall of 
 " Adam," the innate depravity of human 
 nature, and the absolute perfection of 
 certain Incarnations, which argues their 
 divinity. He can only wail over the pre- 
 valence of evil, assume its foundation to be 
 error, and purpose to abate it by uprooting 
 that Ignorance which bears and feeds it. 
 
 His " eschatology," like that of the Sufis 
 generally, is vague and shadowy. He may 
 lean towards the doctrine of Marc Aurelius, 
 " The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried : 
 all things are changes not into nothing, 
 but into that which is not at present." 
 This is one of the monstruosa opinionum 
 portenta mentioned by the XlXth General 
 Council, alias the First Council of the 
 Vatican. But he only accepts it with a 
 limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not 
 the intellectual, worship of " Nature," 
 which moderns define to be an " unscien- 
 tific and imaginary synonym for the sum 
 total of observed phenomena." Con- 
 
THE KASfDAH 
 
 31 
 
 sequently he holds to the "dark and 
 degrading doctrines of the Materialist," 
 the " Hylotheist " ; in opposition to the 
 spiritualist, a distinction far more marked 
 in the West than in the East. Europe 
 draws a hard, dry line between Spirit and 
 Matter : Asia does not. 
 
 Among us the Idealist objects to the 
 Materialists that the latter cannot agree 
 upon fundamental points ; that they can- 
 not define what is an atom ; that they 
 cannot account for the transformation of 
 physical action and molecular motion into 
 consciousness ; and vice versa, that they 
 cannot say what matter is ; and, lastly, 
 that Berkeley and his school have proved 
 the existence of spirit while denying that 
 of matter. 
 
 The Materialists reply that the want of 
 agreement shows only a study insufficiently 
 advanced ; that man cannot describe an 
 atom, because he is still an infant in 
 science, yet there is no reason why his 
 mature manhood should not pass through 
 error and incapacity to truth and know- 
 ledge ; that consciousness becomes a pro- 
 perty of matter when certain conditions 
 are present ; that Hyle (vkr]) or Matter may 
 be provisionally defined as "phenomena 
 with a substructure of their own, transcen- 
 dental and eternal, subject to the action, 
 direct or indirect, of the five senses, whilst 
 its properties present themselves in three 
 states, the solid, the liquid and the gaseous." 
 To casuistical Berkeley they prefer the 
 common sense of mankind. They ask the 
 idealist and the spiritualist why they can- 
 not find names for themselves without 
 borrowing from a "dark and degraded" 
 school ; why the former must call himself 
 
 after his eye (idein); the latter after his 
 breath (spiritus)} Thus the Hdji twits 
 them with affixing their own limitations 
 to their own Almighty Power, and, as 
 Socrates said, with bringing down Heaven 
 to the market-place. 
 
 Modern thought tends more and more 
 to reject crude idealism and to support the 
 monistic theory, the double aspect, the 
 transfigured realism. It discusses the 
 Nature of Things in Themselves. To the 
 question, is there anything outside of us 
 which corresponds with our sensations ? 
 that is to say, is the whole world simply 
 " I," they reply that obviously there is a 
 something else; and that this something 
 else produces the brain-disturbance which 
 is called sensation. Instinct orders us to 
 do something; Reason (the balance of 
 faculties) directs ; and the strongest motive 
 controls. Modern Science, by the dis- 
 covery of Radiant Matter, a fourth con- 
 dition, seems to conciUate the two schools. 
 " La d6couverte d'un quatrifeme 6tat de la 
 matiSre,'' says a Reviewer, " c'est la porte 
 ouverte £l I'infini de ses transformations ; 
 c'est I'homme invisible et impalpable de 
 mSme possible sans cesser d'etre substan- 
 tiel ; c'est le monde des esprits entrant sans 
 absurdity dans la domaine des hypotheses 
 scientifiques ; c'est la possibilit6 pour le 
 mat6rialiste de croire k la vie d'outre 
 tombe, sans renoncer au substratum mat6- 
 riel qu'il croit n6cessaire au maintien de 
 rindividualit6.'' 
 
 With Hdji Abdu the soul is not material, 
 for that would be a contradiction of terms. 
 He regards it with many moderns, as a 
 state of things, not a thing ; a convenient 
 word denoting the sense of personality, of 
 
THE KASIDAH 
 
 32 
 
 individual identity. In its ghostly signifi- 
 cation he discovers an artificial dogma 
 which could hardly belong to the brutal 
 savages of the Stone Age. He finds it in 
 the funereal books of ancient Egypt, 
 whence probably it passed to the Zenda- 
 vesta and the Vedas. In the Hebrew 
 Pentateuch, of which part is still attri- 
 buted to Moses, it is unknown, or, rather, 
 it is deliberately ignored by the author or 
 authors. The early Christians could not 
 agree upon the subject ; Origen advocated 
 the pre-existence of men's souls, supposing 
 them to have been all created at one time 
 and successively embodied. Others make 
 Spirit born with the hour of birth : and so 
 forth. 
 
 But the brain-action or, if you so phrase 
 it, the mind, is not confined to the 
 reasoning faculties ; nor can we afford to 
 ignore the sentiments, the affections which 
 are, perhaps, the most potent realities of 
 Ufe. Their loud affirmative voice contrasts 
 strongly with the titubant accents of the 
 intellect. They seem to demand a future 
 life, even a state of rewards and punish- 
 ments from the Maker of the world, the 
 Ortolano Eterno^ the Potter of the East, 
 the Watchmaker of the West. They 
 protest against the idea of annihilation. 
 They revolt at the notion of eternal parting 
 from parents, kinsmen and firiends. Yet 
 the dogma of a future life is by no means 
 catholic and universal. The Anglo-Euro- 
 
 I The Eternal Gardener : so the old inscription 
 saying :^ 
 
 locatus est in \ 
 
 damnatus est in 
 humatus est in 
 renatus est in 
 
 Homo 
 
 horto. 
 
 pean race apparently cannot exist without 
 it, and we have lately heard of the " Aryan 
 Soul-land." On the other hand, many 
 of the Buddhist and even the Brahman 
 Schools preach Nirwina (comparative 
 non-existence) and Parinirwina (absolute 
 nothingness). Moreover, the great Tura- 
 nian family, actually occupying all Eastern 
 Asia, has ever ignored it ; and the 
 200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the 
 mass of the nation, protest emphatically 
 against the mainstay of the western creeds, 
 because it " unfits men for the business 
 and duty of life, by fixing their speculations 
 on an unknown world." And even its 
 votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, 
 cannot deny that the next world is a copy, 
 more or less idealized, of the present ; and 
 that it lacks a single particular savouring 
 of originality. It is in fact a mere con- 
 tinuation ; and the continuation is " not 
 proven." 
 
 It is most hard to be a. man; 
 
 and the Pilgrim's sole consolation is in 
 self-cultivation, and in the pleasures of the 
 affections. This sympathy may be an 
 indirect self-love, a reflection of the light 
 of egotism : still it is so transferred as to 
 imply a different system of convictions. 
 It requires a different name : to call bene- 
 volence " self-love " is to make the fruit or 
 flower not only depend upon a root for 
 development (which is true), but the very 
 root itself (which is false). And, finally, 
 his ideal is of the highest : his praise is 
 reserved for : 
 
 — Lives 
 Lived in obedience to the inner law 
 Which cannot alter. 
 
THE KAStDAH 
 
 35 
 
 NOTE II 
 
 A FEW words concerning the Kasidah it- 
 self. Our Hdji begins with a mise-en-scine ; 
 and takes leave of the Caravan setting out 
 for Meccah. He sees the "Wolfs tail" 
 (Dum-i-Gnrg), the XvKavyis, or wolf-gleam, 
 the Diluculum, the Zodiacal dawn-light, the 
 first faint brushes of white radiating from 
 below the Eastern horizon. It is accom- 
 panied by the morning-breath fDa»t-t-S«6/!^, 
 the current of air, almost imperceptible ex- 
 cept by the increase of cold, which Moslem 
 physiologists suppose to be the early prayer 
 offered by Nature to the First Cause. The 
 Ghul-i-Biy4bdn (Desert-Demon) is evi- 
 dently the personification of man's fears 
 and of the dangers that surround travelling 
 in the wilds. The " wold-where-none-save- 
 He (Allah) -can-dwell " is a great and ter- 
 rible wilderness (Dasht-i-ld-siwd Hu); and 
 Allah's Holy Hill is Arafdt, near Meccah, 
 which the Caravan reaches after passing 
 through Al-Madinah. The first section ends 
 with a sore lament that the " meetings of 
 this world take place upon the highway of 
 Separation" ; and the original also has : — • 
 
 The chill of sorrow numbs my thought; me- 
 thinks I hear the passing knell; 
 
 As dies across yon thin blue line the tinkling 
 of the Camel-bell. 
 
 The next section quotes the various 
 aspects under which Life appeared to the 
 wise and foolish teachers of humanity. 
 First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines 
 are quoted beginning with Shab-i-tirik o 
 bim-i-mauj, &c. Hur is the plural of 
 
 Ahwar, in full Ahwar al'A3m, a maid whose 
 eyes are intensely white where they should 
 be white, and black elsewhere : hence 
 our silly " Houries." Follows Umar-i- 
 Khayyim, who spiritualized Tasawwuf, 
 or Sufi-ism, even as the Sufts (Gnostics) 
 spirituaUzed Moslem Puritanism. The 
 verses alluded to are: — 
 
 You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse 
 I made a second marriage in my house, 
 
 Divorced old barren Reason from my bed 
 
 And took the daughter of the Vine to spouse. 
 
 (St. 60, Mr. Fitzgerald's translation.) 
 
 Here " Wine " is used in its mystic sense 
 of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. 
 Umar was hated and feared because he 
 spoke boldly when his brethren the Sufis 
 dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation 
 has been trained into a likeness of the 
 " Hymn of Life," despite the commonplace 
 and the navrante vulgarity which charac- 
 terize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American 
 School. The same has been done to the 
 words of Isd (Jesus) ; for the author, who 
 is well-read in the Ingll (Evangel), evi- 
 dently intended the allusion. Mansur al- 
 Hallilj (the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned 
 for crudely uttering the Pantheistic dogma 
 Ana 'I Hakk (I am the Truth, i.e., God), 
 wa laysa fl-jubbati iV Allah (and within my 
 coat is nought but God). His blood traced 
 on the ground the first-quoted sentence. 
 Lastly, there is a quotation from " Sar- 
 danapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes," &c. : 
 here jraife may mean sport ; but the context 
 
THE KASIDAH 
 
 34 
 
 determines the kind of sport intended. 
 The Zdhid is the literal believer in the 
 letter of the Law, opposed to the Sufi, 
 who believes in its spirit : hence the former 
 is called a Zihiri (outsider), and the latter 
 a B4tini, an insider. Moses is quoted 
 because he ignored future rewards and 
 punishments. As regards the " two Eter- 
 nities,'' Persian and Arab metaphysicians 
 split Eternity, i.e., the negation of Time, 
 into two halves, Azal (beginninglessness) 
 and A had (endlessness) ; both being mere 
 words, gatherings of letters with a sub- 
 jective significance. In English we use 
 "Eternal" {JEviternus, age-long, life-long) 
 as loosely, by applying it to three distinct 
 ideas; (i) the habitual, in popular par- 
 lance ; (2) the exempt from duration ; and 
 (3) the everlasting, which embraces all 
 duration. "Omniscience-Maker" is the 
 old Roman sceptic's Homo fecit Deos. 
 
 The next section is one long wail over 
 the contradictions, the mysteries, the dark 
 end, the infinite sorrowfulness of all exist- 
 ence, and the arcanum of grief which, 
 Luther said, underlies all life. As with 
 Euripides " to live is to die, to die is to 
 live." Hdji Abdu borrows the Hindu idea 
 of the human body. " It is a mansion," 
 says Menu, " with bones for its beams and 
 rafters ; with nerves and tendons for cords ; 
 with muscles and blood for cement ; with 
 skin for its outer covering; filled with no 
 sweet perfume, but loaded with impurities ; 
 a mansion infested by age and sorrow ; 
 the seat of malady ; harassed with pains ; 
 haunted with the quality of darkness (Tama- 
 guna), and incapable of standing." The 
 Pot and Potter began with the ancient 
 Egyptians. " Sitting as a potter at the 
 
 wheel, Cneph (at Philae) moulds clay, and 
 gives the spirit of life to the nostrils of 
 Osiris.'' Hence the Genesitic " breath.'' 
 Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being 
 " by whom the fictile vase is formed ; the 
 clay out of which it is fabricated." We 
 find him next in Jeremiah's " Arise and go 
 down unto the Potter's house," &c. (xviii. 2), 
 and lastly in Romans (ix. 20), " Hath not 
 the potter power over the clay ? " No 
 wonder that the first Hand who moulded 
 the man-mud is a lieu commun in Eastern 
 thought. The " waste of agony " is Budd- 
 hism, or Schopenhauerism pure and simple. 
 I have moulded " Earth on Earth " upon 
 " Seint Ysidre " 's well-known rhymes (a.d. 
 1440) :— 
 
 Erthe out of Erthe is wondirli wrouzt, 
 Erthe of Erth hath gete a dignite of nouzt, 
 Erthe upon Erthe hath sett all his thouzt 
 How that Erthe upon Erthe may be his brouzt, &c. 
 
 The " Camel-rider," suggests Ossian, 
 " yet a few years and the blast of the 
 desert comes." The dromedary was chosen 
 as Death's vehicle by the Arabs, probably 
 because it bears the Badawi's corpse to 
 the distant burial-ground, where he will lie 
 among his kith and kin. The end of this 
 section reminds us of: — 
 
 How poor, how rich; how abject, how august, 
 How complicate, how wonderful is Man ! 
 
 The HdjJ now passes to the results of 
 his long and anxious thoughts : I have pur- 
 posely twisted his exordium into an echo 
 of Milton : — 
 
 Till old experience doth attain 
 To something of prophetic strain. 
 
 He boldly declares that there is no God 
 as man has created his Creator. Here 
 he is at one with modern thought : — " En 
 
THE K A SID AH 
 
 33 
 
 g6n6ral les croyants font le Dieu comme 
 ils sont eux-m6mes,'' (says J. J. Rousseau, 
 " Confessions," 1.6): "les bons le font bon : 
 les mdchants le font mdchant : les divots 
 haineux et bilieux, ne voient que I'enfer, 
 parce qu'ils voudraient damner tout le 
 monde ; les dmes aimantes et douces n'y 
 croient guSre ; et I'un des 6tonnements dont 
 je ne reviens pas est de voirle bon F6n61on 
 en parler dans son T616maque comme s'il 
 y croyoit tout de bon : mais j'espfere qu'il 
 mentoit alors ; car enfin quelque v6ridique 
 qu'on soit, il faut bien mentir quelquefois 
 quand on est 6v6que." " Man depicts 
 himself in his godfe," says Schiller. Hence 
 the NaturgoU, the deity of all ancient peoples, 
 and with which every system began, allowed 
 and approved of actions distinctly immoral, 
 often diabolical. Belief became moralized 
 only when the conscience of the community, 
 and with it of the individual items, began 
 aspiring to its golden age, — Perfection. 
 " Dieu est le superlatif, dont le positif est 
 I'homme,'' says CarlVogt; meaning, that 
 the popular idea of a numen is that of a 
 magnified and non-natural man. 
 
 He tlaen quotes his authorities. Buddha, 
 whom the Catholic Church converted 
 to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize 
 Ishwara (the deity), on account of the 
 mystery of the "cruelty of things." Scho- 
 penhauer, Miss Cobbe's model pessimist, 
 who at the humblest distance represents 
 Buddha in the world of Western thought, 
 found the vision of man's unhappiness, 
 irrespective of his actions, so overpowering 
 that he concluded the Supreme Will to 
 be malevolent, " heartless, cowardly, and 
 arrogant." Confucius, the "Throneless 
 king, more powerful than all kings," denied 
 
 a personal deity. The Epicurean idea 
 rules the China of the present day. " God 
 is great, but he lives too far off," say the 
 Turanian Santils in Aryan India; and 
 this is the general language of man in the 
 Turanian East. 
 
 HijJ Abdu evidently holds that idolatry 
 begins with a personal deity. And let us 
 note that the latter is deliberately denied 
 by the " Thirty-nine Articles." With them 
 God is " a Being without Parts (personality) 
 or Passions." He professes a vague Agnos- 
 ticism, and attributes popular faith to the 
 fact that Timor fecit Deos; " every religion 
 being, without exception, the child of fear 
 and ignorance" (Carl Vogt). He now 
 speaks as the " Drawer of the Wine," the 
 " Ancient Taverner," the " Old Magus," 
 the " Patron of the Mughin or Magians " ; 
 all titles appUed to the Sufi as opposed to 
 the Zihid. His "idols" are the eidola 
 (illusions) of Bacon, "having their founda- 
 tions in the very constitution of man," 
 and therefore appropriately called fabulie. 
 That " Nature's Common Course " is 
 subject to various interpretation, may be 
 easily proved. Aristotle was as great a 
 subverter as Alexander; but the quasi- 
 prophetical Stagyrite of the Dark Ages, 
 who ruled the world till the end of the 
 thirteenth century, became the " twice 
 execrable" of Martin Luther; and was 
 finally abolished by Galileo and Newton. 
 Here I have excised two stanzas. The 
 first is : — 
 
 Theories for truths, fable for fact; system for 
 
 science vex the thought 
 Life's one great lesson you despise — to know 
 
 tiiat all we know is nought. 
 
THE K A SID AH 
 
 36 
 
 This is in fact : — 
 
 Well didst thou say, Athena's noblest son, 
 The most we know is nothing can be known. 
 
 The next is : — 
 
 Essence and substance, sequence, cause, be- 
 ginning, ending, space and time, 
 
 These be the toys of manhood's mind, at once 
 ridiculous and subUme. 
 
 He is not the only one who so regards 
 "bothering Time and Space.'" A late 
 definition of the " infinitely great,'' viz., 
 that the idea arises from denying form to 
 any figure; of the "infinitely small," from 
 refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair 
 specimen of the "dismal science" — meta- 
 physics. 
 
 Another omitted stanza reads : — 
 
 How canst thou, Phenomen ! pretend the Nou- 
 
 menon to mete and span? 
 Say which were easier probed and proved. 
 
 Absolute Being or mortal man? 
 
 One would think that he had read Kant 
 on the " Knowable and the Unknowable," 
 or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could 
 " differentiate between the Finite and the 
 Infinite." It is a common-place of the age, 
 in the West as well as the East, that Science 
 is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach 
 the Noumena, the things themselves. This 
 is the scholastic realism, the " residuum of 
 a bad metaphysic," which deforms the 
 system of Comte. With all its pretensions, 
 it simply means that there are, or can be 
 conceived, things in themselves (i.e., un- 
 related to thought) ; that we know them to 
 exist ; and, at the same time, that we cannot 
 know what they are. But who dares say 
 " cannot " ? Who can measure man's work 
 when he shall be as superior to our present 
 selves as we are to the Cave-man of past 
 time ? 
 
 The " Chain of Universe " alludes to the 
 Jain idea that the whole, consisting of 
 intellectual as well as of natural principles, 
 existed from aU eternity ; and that it has 
 been subject to endless revolutions, whose 
 causes are the inherent powers of nature, 
 intellectual as well as physical, without 
 the intervention of a deity. But the Poet 
 ridicules the " non-human," i.e., the not- 
 ourselves, the negation of ourselves and con- 
 sequently a non-existence. Most Easterns 
 confuse the contradictories, in which one 
 term stands for something, and the other 
 for nothing (e.g., ourselves and not-our- 
 selves), with the contraries (e.g., rich and 
 not-rich = poor), in which both terms ex- 
 press a something. So the positive-negative 
 " infinite " is not the complement of "finite," 
 but its negation. The Western man derides 
 the process by making " not-horse " the 
 complementary entity of " horse.'" The 
 Pilgrim ends with the favourite Sufi tenet 
 that the five (six ?) senses are the doors of 
 all human knowledge, and that no form 
 of man, incarnation of the deity, prophet, 
 apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea 
 not conceived within his brain by the sole 
 operation of these vulgar material agents. 
 Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor 
 idealist. 
 
 He then proceeds to show that man 
 depicts himself in his God, and that " God 
 is the racial expression'"; a pedagogue on 
 the Nile, an abstraction in India, and an 
 astrologer in Chaldasa ; where Abraham, 
 says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, § 2, and 
 II. 9, § 2) was " skilful in the celestrial 
 science.'" He notices the Ak4rana-2amdn 
 (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the 
 working dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He 
 
THE KASfDAH 
 
 37 
 
 brands the God of the Hebrews with 
 pugnacity and cruelty. He has heard of 
 the beautiful creations of Greek fancy 
 which, not attributing a moral nature to 
 the deity, included Theology in Physics; 
 and which, like Professor Tyndall, seemed 
 to consider all matter everywhere alive. 
 We have adopted a very different Unit- 
 arianism ; Theology, with its one Creator ; 
 Pantheism with its " one Spirit's plastic 
 stress " ; and Science with its one Energy. 
 He is hard upon Christianity and its 
 "trinal God": I have not softened his 
 expression (UX. = a riddle), although it 
 may offend readers. There is nothing more 
 enigmatical to the Moslem mind than 
 Christian Trinitarianism : all other objec- 
 tions they can get over, not this. Nor is 
 he any lover of Islamism, which, like 
 Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and 
 its Hellenic hedonism ; with the world 
 of thought moving between these two 
 extremes. The former defined as pre- 
 dominant or exclusive care for the practice 
 of right, is represented by Semitic and 
 Arab influence, Kordnic and Hadisic. The 
 latter, the reUgion of humanity, a passion 
 for life and hght, for culture and intel- 
 ligence ; for art, poetry and science, is 
 represented in Islamism by the fondly and 
 impiously-cherished memory of the old 
 Guebre kings and heroes, beauties, bards 
 and sages. Hence the mention of Zil and 
 his son Rustam ; of Cyrus and of the Jdm- 
 i-Jashid, which|^may be translated either 
 grail (cup) or mirror ; it showed the world 
 within its rim ; and hence it was called Jdm- 
 i-Jahin-numd (universe-exposing). The 
 contemptuous expressions about the diet of 
 camel's milk and the meat of the Susmar, 
 
 or green lizard, are evidently quoted from 
 Firdausi's famous lines beginning : — 
 Arab-ri be-jai rastd'est kar. 
 
 The Hdji is severe upon those who make 
 of the Deity a Khw4n-i-yaghmd (or tray of 
 plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He 
 looks upon the shepherds as men, 
 
 — Who rob the sheep themselves to clothe. 
 
 So Schopenhauer (Leben, &c. by Wilhelm 
 Gewinner) furiously shows how the 
 " English nation ought to treat that set 
 of hypocrites, impostors and money- 
 graspers, the clergy, that annually devours 
 ;f3,5oo,ooo." 
 
 The Hijt broadly asserts that there is no 
 Good and no Evil in the absolute sense as 
 man has made them. Here he is one with 
 Pope : — 
 
 And spite of pride, in erring nature's spite 
 One truth is clear — whatever is, is right. 
 
 Unfortunately the converse is just as true : — 
 whatever is, is wrong. Khizr is the Elijah 
 who puzzled Milman. He represents the 
 Sufi, the B4tini, while Mus4 (Moses) is 
 the Zdhid, the Z&hiti ; and the strange 
 adventures of the twain, invented by the 
 Jews, have been appropriated by the 
 Moslems. He derides the Freewill of 
 man ; and, like Diderot, he detects 
 "pantaloon in a prelate, a satyr in a 
 president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in 
 a minister, and a goose in a chief clerk." 
 He holds to Fortune, the Ti!x'7 of Alcman, 
 which is, Eijvonijas t£ koi ILeidovs dSiX.<f}a, 
 Kot ILpo/xa dda'sdvyarrjp, — Chance, the sis- 
 ter of Order and Trust, and the daughter of 
 Forethought. The Scandinavian Spinners 
 of Fate were Urd (the Was, the Past), 
 Verdandi (the Becoming, or Present), and 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 38 
 
 Skuld (the To-be, or Future.) He alludes 
 to Plato, who made the Demiurgos create 
 the Worlds by the Logos (the Hebrew 
 Dabar) or Creative Word, through the 
 ^ons. These Aiwvcs of the Mystics were 
 spiritual emanations from Aluiv, lit. a wave 
 influx, an age, period, or day; hence the 
 Latin avum, and the Welsh Awen, the 
 stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. 
 Basilides, the Egypto-Christian, made the 
 Creator evolve seven ^Eons or Pteromata 
 (fulnesses) ; from two of whom, Wisdom 
 and Power, proceeded the 365 degrees of 
 Angels. All were subject to a Prince of 
 Heaven, called Abraxas, who was himself 
 under guidance of the chief ^on, Wisdom. 
 Others represent the first Cause to have 
 produced an ^Eon or Pure Intelligence ; 
 the first a second, and so forth till the 
 tenth. This was material enough to affect 
 Hyle, which thereby assumed a spiritual 
 form. Thus the two incompatibles com- 
 bined in the Scheme of Creation. 
 
 He denies the three ages of the Buddhists : 
 the wholly happy ; the happy mixed with 
 misery, and the miserable tinged with 
 happiness, — the present. The Zoroastrians 
 had four, each of 3,000 years. In the first, 
 Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone ; then 
 Ahriman, the bad-god, began to work sub- 
 serviently ; in the third both ruled equally ; 
 and in the last, now current, Ahriman has 
 gained the day. 
 
 Against the popular idea that man has 
 caused the misery of this world, he cites the 
 ages when the Old Red Sandstone bred 
 gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites 
 produced the mighty reptile tyrants of air, 
 earth, and sea ; and when the monsters 
 of the Eocene and Miocene periods shook 
 
 the ground with their ponderous tread. 
 And the world of waters is still a hideous 
 scene of cruelty, carnage, and destruction. 
 
 He declares Conscience to be a geo- 
 graphical and chronological accident. 
 Thus he answers the modern philosopher 
 whose soul was overwhelmed by the marvel 
 and the awe of two things, " the starry 
 heaven above and the moral law within." 
 He makes the latter sense a development 
 of the gregarious and social instincts ; and 
 so travellers have observed that the moral 
 is the last step in mental progress. His 
 Moors are the savage Dankali and other 
 negroid tribes, who offer a cup of milk with 
 one hand and stab with the other. He 
 translates literally the Indian word H4thJ 
 (an elephant), the animal with the Hdth 
 (hand, or trunk). Finally he alludes to 
 the age of active volcanoes, the present, 
 which is merely temporary, the shifting 
 of the Pole, and the spectacle to be seen 
 from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter. 
 
 The Hiji again asks the old, old question. 
 What is Truth ? And he answers himself, 
 after the fashion of the wise Emperor of 
 China, " Truth hath not an unchanging 
 name." A modern English writer says : 
 " I have long been convinced by the ex- 
 perience of my life, as a pioneer of various 
 heterodoxies which are rapidly becoming 
 orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is tem- 
 peramental to us, or given in the affections 
 and intuitions ; and that discussion and 
 inquiry do little more than feed tempera- 
 ment." Our poet seems to mean that the 
 Perceptions, when they perceive truly, 
 convey objective truth, which is universal ; 
 whereas the Reflectives and the Sentiments, 
 the working of the moral region, or the 
 
THE KASIDAH 
 
 39 
 
 middle lobe of the phrenologists, supplies 
 only subjective truth, personal and indi- 
 vidual. Thus to one man the axiom. Opes 
 irritamenta malorum, represents a distinct 
 fact ; while another holds wealth to be an 
 incentive for good. Evidently both are 
 right, according to their lights. 
 
 Hdji Abdu cites Plato and Aristotle, as 
 usual with Eastern songsters, who deUght 
 in Mantik (logic). Here he appears to 
 mean that a false proposition is as real a 
 proposition as one that is true. " Faith 
 moves mountains" and "Manet immota 
 fides'' are evidently quotations. He 
 derides the teaching of the " First Council 
 of the Vatican " (cap. v.), " all the faithful 
 are Uttle children listening to the voice of 
 St. Peter," who is the " Prince of the 
 Apostles." He glances at the fancy of 
 certain modern physicists, " devotion is 
 a definite molecular change in the convolu- 
 tion of grey pulp." He notices with con- 
 tumely the riddle of which Milton speaks 
 so glibly, where the Dialoguists, 
 
 — reasoned high 
 Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute. 
 
 In opposition to the orthodox Moham- 
 medan tenets which make Man's soul his 
 percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Sufi 
 considers it a fancy, opposed to body, 
 which is a fact ; at most a state of things, 
 not a thing ; a concensus of faculties where- 
 of our frames are but the phenomena. 
 This is not contrary to Genesitic legend. 
 The Hebrew Ruach and Arabic Ruh, now 
 perverted to mean soul or spirit, simply 
 signify wind or breath, the outward and 
 visible sign of life. Their later schools are 
 even more explicit: "For that which be- 
 
 falls man befalls beasts; as the one dies, 
 so does the other ; they have all one death ; 
 all go unto one place " (Eccles. iii. 19). But 
 the modem soul, a nothing, a string of 
 negations, a negative in chief, is thus des- 
 cribed in the Mah4bhdrat: "It is indi- 
 visible, inconceivable, inconceptible, it is 
 eternal, universal, permanent, immovable ; 
 it is invisible and unalterable." Hence 
 the modern spiritualism which, rejecting 
 materialism, can use only material lan- 
 guage. 
 
 These, says the H4ji, are mere sounds. 
 He would not assert " Verba gignunt 
 verba," but " Verba gignunt res," a step 
 further. The idea is Bacon's "idola fori, 
 omnium molestissima," the twofold illu- 
 sions of language ; either the names of 
 things that have no existence in fact, or 
 the names of things whose idea is confused 
 and ill-defined. 
 
 He derives the Soul-idea from the 
 " savage ghost " which Dr. Johnson defined 
 to be a " kind of shadowy being." He 
 justly remarks that it arose (perhaps) in 
 Egypt ; a-ud was not invented by the 
 " People of the Book.'' By this term 
 Moslems denote Jews and Christians who 
 have a recognized revelation, while their 
 ignorance refuses it to Guebres, Hindus, 
 and Confucians. 
 
 He evidently holds to the doctrine of 
 progress. With him protoplasm is the 
 Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word 
 matter is derived from the Sanskrit HraT 
 (mitrd), which, however, signifies properly 
 the invisible type of visible matter ; in 
 modern language, the substance distinct 
 from the sum of its physical and chemical 
 properties. Thus, M4trd exists only in 
 
THE KASiDAH 
 
 40 
 
 thought, and is not recognizable by the 
 action of the five senses. His " Chain of 
 Being " reminds us of Prof. Huxley's 
 Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, Meso- 
 hippus, Meiohippus, Protohippus, Pleio- 
 hippus, and Equus. He has evidently 
 heard of modern biology, or Hylozoism, 
 which holds its quarter-million species of 
 living beings, animal and vegetable, to be 
 progressive modifications of one great funda- 
 mental unity, an unity of so-called " mental 
 faculties " as well as of bodily structure. 
 And this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at 
 the popular idea that man is the great 
 central figure round which all things gyrate 
 like marionettes; in fact, the anthropo- 
 centric era of Draper, which, strange to 
 say, lives by the side of the telescope and 
 the microscope. As man is of recent 
 origin, and may end at an early epoch of 
 the macrocosm, so before his birth all 
 things revolved round nothing, and may 
 continue to do so after his death. 
 
 The H4ji, who elsewhere denounces 
 "compound ignorance," holds that all evil 
 comes from error ; and that all knowledge 
 has been developed by overthrowing error, 
 the ordinary channel of human thought. 
 He ends this section with a great truth. 
 There are things which human Reason or 
 Instinct matured, in its undeveloped state, 
 cannot master; but Reason is a Law to 
 itself. Therefore we are not bound to 
 believe, or to attempt belief in, any thing 
 which is contrary or contradictory to 
 Reason. Here he is diametrically opposed 
 to Rome, who says, "Do not appeal to 
 History ; that is private judgment. Do not 
 appeal to Holy Writ ; that is heresy. Do 
 not appeal to Reason; that is rationalism. 
 
 He holds with the Patriarchs of Hebrew 
 Holy Writ, that the present life is all- 
 sufficient for an intellectual (not a senti- 
 mental) being ; and, therefore, that there 
 is no want of a Heaven or a Hell. With 
 far more contradiction the Western poet 
 sings : — 
 
 Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 
 In one self-place; but when we are in hell 
 And where hell is there must we ever be, 
 And, to be short, when all this world dissolves, 
 And every creature shall be purified, 
 All places shall be hell which are not heaven. 
 
 For what want is there of a Hell when all 
 are pure? He enlarges upon the ancient 
 Buddhist theory, that Happiness and 
 Misery are equally distributed among men 
 and beasts ; some enjoy much and suffer 
 much ; others the reverse. Hence Diderot 
 declares, " Sober passions produce only 
 the commonplace . . . the man of 
 moderate passion lives and dies like a 
 brute." And again we have the half- 
 truth :— 
 
 That the mark of rank in nature 
 Is capacity for pain. 
 
 The latter implies an equal capacity for 
 pleasure, and thus the balance is kept. 
 
 Hdji Abdii then proceeds to show that 
 Faith is an accident of birth. One of his 
 omitted distichs says : — 
 
 Race makes religion ; true ! but aye upon the 
 
 the Maker acts the made, 
 A finite God, an infinite sin, in lieu of raising 
 
 man, degrade. 
 
 In a manner of dialogue he introduces the 
 various races each fighting to establish its 
 own belief. The Frank (Christian) abuses 
 the Hindu, who retorts that he is of 
 Mlenchha, mixed or impure, blood, a term 
 applied to all non-Hindus. The same is 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 41 
 
 done by Nazarene and Mohammedan; by 
 the Confucian, who believes in nothing, 
 and by the Sufi, who naturally has the last 
 word. The association of the Virgin Mary 
 and Saint Joseph with the Trinity, in the 
 Roman and Greek Churches, makes many 
 Moslems conclude that Christians believe 
 not in three but in five persons. So an 
 Englishman writes of the early Fathers, 
 "They not only said that 3 = 1, and that 
 1 = 3: they professed to explain how that 
 curious arithmetical combination had been 
 brought about. The Indivisible had been 
 divided, and yet was not divided : it was 
 divisible, and yet" it was indivisible ; black 
 was white, and white was black ; and yet 
 there were not two colours but one colour ; 
 and whoever did not believe it would be 
 damned." The Arab quotation runs in the 
 original : — 
 
 Ahsanu 7- Makdni f U- Fati 'l-Jahannamu 
 The best of places for (the generous) youth is 
 Gehenna : 
 
 Gehenna, alias Jahim, being the fiery place 
 of eternal punishment. And the second 
 saying, Al- ndr wa Id 'l-'Ar — " Fire (of Hell) 
 rather than Shame," — is equally con- 
 demned by the Koranist. The Gustiki 
 (insolence) of Fate is the expression of 
 Umar-i-Khayydm (St. xxx) : — 
 
 What, without asking hither hurried whence ? 
 And, without aslcing whither hurned hence! 
 
 Oh many a cup of this forbidden wine 
 Must drown the memories of that insolence. 
 
 Sufistically, the word means " the co- 
 quetry of the beloved one," the divinse 
 particula aurae. And the section ends with 
 Pope's : — 
 
 He can't be wrong whose life is in the right. 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Here the Hdji ends his practical study 
 of mankind. The image of Destiny play- 
 ing with men as pieces is a view common 
 amongst Easterns. His idea of wisdom is 
 once more Pope's : — 
 
 And all our knowledge is ourselves to know. 
 
 (Essay IV. 398.) 
 
 Regret, i.e., repentance, was one of 
 the forty-two deadly sins of the Ancient 
 Egyptians. " Thou shalt not consume thy 
 heart," says the Ritual of the Dead, the 
 negative justification of the soul or ghost 
 (Lepsius "Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs"). 
 We have borrowed competitive examina- 
 tion from the Chinese ; and, in these 
 morbid days of weak introspection and 
 retrospection, we might learn wisdom from 
 
 the sturdy old Khemites. When he sings 
 " Abjure the Why and seek the How," he 
 refers to the old Scholastic difference of 
 the Demonstratio propter quid (why is a 
 thing?), as opposed to Demonstratio quia 
 (i.e. that a thing is). The " great Man " 
 shall end with becoming deathless, as 
 Shakespeare says in his noble sonnet : — 
 
 And Death once dead, there's no more dying 
 then! 
 
 Like the great Pagans, the Hdji holds 
 
 that man was born good, while the 
 
 Christian, " tormented by the things 
 
 divine," cleaves to the comforting doctrine 
 
 of innate sinfulness. Hence the universal 
 
 tenet, that man should do good in order 
 
 to gain by it here or hereafter; the 
 
 II 
 
THE KASlDAH 
 
 42 
 
 "enlightened selfishness," that says, Act 
 well and get compound interest in a future 
 state. The allusion to the " Theist-word " 
 apparently means that the votaries of a 
 personal Deity must believe in the absolute 
 foreknowledge of the Omniscient in par- 
 ticulars as in generals. The Rule of Law 
 emancipates man; and its exceptions are 
 the gaps left by his ignorance. The wail 
 over the fallen flower, &c., reminds us of 
 the Pulambal (Lamentations) of the Anti- 
 Brahminical writer, " Pathira-Giriyir." 
 The allusion to M4yd is from Dds Kabir : — 
 
 M^y^ mare, na man mare, mar mar gay& sartr. 
 
 Illusion dies, the mind dies not though dead and 
 gone the flesh. 
 
 Nirwdnd, I have said, is partial extinction 
 by being merged in the Supreme, not to be 
 
 confounded with Pari-nirw4n4 or absolute 
 annihilation. In the former also, dying 
 gives birth to a new being, the embodi- 
 ment of karma (deeds), good and evil, done 
 in the countless ages of transmigration. 
 
 Here ends my share of the work. On 
 the whole it has been considerable. I 
 have omitted, as has been seen, sundry 
 stanzas, and I have changed the order of 
 others. The text has nowhere been trans- 
 lated verbatim ; in fact, a familiar Euro- 
 pean turn has been given to many senti- 
 ments which were judged too Oriental. As 
 the metre adopted by Hijl Abdu was the 
 Bahy Tawtl (long verse), I thought it advis- 
 able to preserve that peculiarity, and to 
 fringe it with the rough, unobtrusive rhyme 
 of the original. 
 
 Vive, valeque I 
 
Finished printing 
 
 this 14th. day of March 1894 
 
 by 
 
 H. S. Nichols & Co. 
 
 3 Soho Square 
 
 London W