The loves of the nightingale and the rose play a conspicuous part in the poems of Hafiz, as well as in those of Sadi and Ferdousi. We give a few specimens from some of his ghazels :—

Now that the rose holds in her hand a cup of pure wine,

The nightingale sings her praises with a hundred thousand tongues.

Again the patient nightingale, from the bough of a cypress,

Repeats his strains, (saying,) May the evil eye

be far from the face of the rose!

O Rose! although thou art the queen of beauty, Do not, for that reason, be cruel to thy wretched downcast lovers.

Hafiz becomes often wearisome, through his repetition of the same idea or metaphor. Want of variety is the grand defect in his style; he is gifted with imagination, but that imagination expends itself upon one limited circle of objects. Nevertheless, he was a poet of unquestionable genius; his works illustrate the manners and customs of one of the most

Such is life-this lonely garden; and its flowers-man's hapless race:

Each in turn Heaven's gardener scatters to its long last resting-place.

Sad it is that all our pleasures thus should hurry from our view;

Sadder still that soul and body have to take their long adieu!

Many a form of beauty slumbers in earth's bosom, side by side;

Strewed by fate, like yonder rose-leaves, rest the monarch and his bride.

O let time, then, teach thee wisdom; tread thou lightly o'er the dead,

When they rest in silent slumber, from their haunts forever fled.

Cast thy love behind thee, Hafiz; bid the earthly dream be o'er;

Nor let all the smiles of beauty tempt thy soul

to error more.

There is in that poem a strain of true pathos, which is not surpassed by the best

polite courts in Asia; his language is lyrics of Horace. Sir William Jones is remarkably pure and elegant. He re

minds us of Horace. Like the Roman poet he seems to have been little better than a refined voluptuary; love and wine made up the burden of his song. There was, also, in the composition of his character, no small proportion of vanity; but we are not surprised at hearing the Persian bard joining in the

Sublimi feriam sidera vertice,

when we think of the popularity he enjoyed. Sadi― of whom more presently -says, that the poetry of Hafiz derived its innate grace from being bathed in the waters of life; and that it equaled the virgins of paradise in beauty.

That “dread of something after death" which, in spite of the levity, the folly, the materialism of the ancient poets, cast the gloom of despondency over their writings, is evident also in the Schiraz Anacreon. Horace has expressed the feeling that pervades much of the poetry of Hafiz :

Huc vina et unguenta, et nimium breves
Flores amænæ ferre jube rosæ ;

Dum res, et ætas, et sororum

Fila trium patiuntur atra.

right when he says, "There is scarce a lesson of morality, or a tender sentiment, in any European language, to which a parallel may not be brought from the poets of Asia. I may confidently affirm that few odes of the Greeks or Romans, upon similar subjects, are more finely polished than the songs of these Persian poets; they want only a reader that can see them in their original dress, and feel their beauties without the disadvantage of a translation."

One more quotation, ere leaving the poet whose works are still sung, as travelers witness, in cottages and in palaces, in schools and in banqueting halls :

The rose has come forth! O, my friends, 'tis the hour

To fill the bright goblet, and drink in the bower!

Come, seize the sweet season-who knows not, too well,

That not always the pearl can be found in the shell:

Love's path is a desert of doubt and dismay, Where none but the foolish would willingly stray;

A truce to your volumes-your studies give o'er

For books cannot teach you love's marvelous lore;

Come, listen to me, ye shall learn it apace, The following quotation is a beautiful If you'll fix fast your thoughts on your mis

instance:

tress's face.

tains a maxim or short narrative in prose, illustrated by distichs, couplets, or stanzas. The sentiments are generally remarkable for their sound views of morality, and even for their religious tone.

In concluding, we cannot resist transcribing the following well-known but exquisitely beautiful poem :—

"Once from a cloud a drop of rain

Fell trembling in the sea;
And when she saw the wide-spread main,
Shame vail'd her modesty.

"What place in this wide sea have I?
What room is left for me?

Sure it were better that I die
In this immensity!

"But while her self-abasing fear
Its lowliness confess'd,

A shell received and welcomed her
And press'd her to its breast.

"And nourish'd there the drop became
A pearl for royal eyes-
Exalted by its lowly shame,

And humbled but to rise."

The literature of Persia deserves the attention not only of the scholar, but of all who can appreciate the truly beautiful. Since the seventeenth century we hear of no original writers there; men are obliged to live upon the treasures of the past. These, fortunately, will amply compensate for the silence now prevailing, where "the daughters of song were wont to be heard; from the casket of gems which Sadi and Hafiz presented to their country, sparkling jewels may still be held up to the admiration of posterity.

[For the National Magazine.] WINTER SCENE IN POLAND.

FROM THE GERMAN OF PFITZER.

STAY within, my child; thou shalt not go
Out to-night to perish in the storm;

Only ravens now, and fierce wolves howling,
Hold their moonlight feast o'er man and horse,
And the Cossack, mad for plunder, prowling,
From the snow digs out the corpse.
Stay within, my child; thou shalt not go;
For if thou wert lost in drifts of snow,

There's no father now to seek thee weeping,
Lead thee home again with faithful hand;

Under winter's bier-cloth is he sleeping?
Roams he in the stranger's land?
Yonder see! a cold and trembling roe,
Chased by wolves, comes flying through the

snow;

Let him in, and give him food and fire! Child, we must be merciful, that so

To thy lost and shelter-seeking sire Strangers may like mercy show.

C. T. B.

A PLEA FOR THE GREAT SEA
SERPENT.

VER since I was a boy-and that's

EVE

long ago I have heard of the sea serpent; and although it has been the fashion to ridicule the existence of the monster, I never met with anything worthy the name of candid argument in support of its nonentity. A few years since Captain M'Quhae, of Her Majesty's ship "Dædalus," officially reported that an enormous sea serpent passed within pistol shot of that ship; and his statement afforded our great modern caricaturist an opportunity of enabling the world to laugh at a representation of sea serpents standing erect upon their tails, and picking sailors off the top-gallant yards of a line-of-battle ship; and people, as with one consent, voted the whole story to be what Jack calls "a yarn;" the possibility, much less the probability of its truth, was poohpoohed; but as to argument, nobody seemed to think it necessary to advance any, to refute such an absurd fiction; except, indeed, that a number of letters were written to the newspapers, asserting that it must have been a seal, which had been mistaken for a sea serpent, because there is a class of seals which resemble the but it must be admitted that this was description given by the gallant captain; merely the opinion of persons who had not seen it, against the powerful evidence and deliberate judgment of ocular demonstration.*

It is well ascertained that in tropical climates, and particularly in India and South America, serpents of an enormous size exist; and, judging from those which have been actually seen, it is difficult to form an idea of the size to which they may attain in the deep recesses of wild and unexplored forests. I lately heard a person, whose veracity I could not doubt, state that he was shooting in the outskirts of a wild Brazilian wood, when stopping to load his gun near to a ruined wall, which had once formed an inclosure, his attention was arrested by what appeared to be a large trunk of a tree, blackened as if it had been subjected to fire, leaning against the ruined wall, at about fifty yards from

It must be remembered, however, that this was also the opinion of that eminent physiologist, Professor Owen.

where he stood. Suddenly he saw the object move, and as it elongated, he perceived it was an enormous serpent, the half of which was on the side of the wall on which he stood, and the other half on the other side. Slowly it drew itself forward, until its whole length was stretched before him, when it glided into the thicket. He declared that he spoke within the mark when he estimated its length at forty feet, and its bulk as large round as his own body; nor is this length by any means improbable, for there is, or was, the skin of a boa in the British Museum thirtyfive feet long.

Before concluding these brief observations upon land serpents, the writer may mention two well-known allusions to these reptiles by ancient authors. Livy gives a relation of the alarm into which the Romans under Regulus were thrown by an enormous snake, which had its lair on the banks of the Bagradas, near Utica, and which is said to have devoured many of the soldiers; and when at length it was killed, its skin, which was sent to Rome, was one hundred and twenty feet in length. Aristotle also writes of Libyan serpents so large that, after pursuing certain voyagers to that coast, they capsized one of the galleys.

Now, reasoning from analogy, may we not ask, Why should not serpents inhabit the vast ocean, as large as those which it is admitted inhabit the vast forests of India and South America? We know that there are hydrophidæ, or water-snakes, of the genera hydrus, pelamys, chersydrus, acrochordus, pseudo-boa, &c.; and we also know that the conger-eel attains a very large size, even when taken off the Channel Islands; and therefore, why should it not be possible, nay probable, that in the unfathomable depths of the mighty seas there should exist serpents larger than ever entered into the mind of man to conceive?

It must be remembered that comparatively little is known of the inhabitants of the ocean; that although the Scriptures speak of" this great wide sea, wherein are creeping things innumerable, both small and great beasts," yet that seamen often traverse the ocean for weeks, passing over thousands of miles, without seeing scarcely a sign of life upon its surface. It frequently happens, during a prolonged voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, that be

yond flushing a covey of flying-fish occasionally, and seeing a few dolphins in chase of them, nothing is seen of the "things innumerable" which are described in God's word as dwelling in the sea; and if this be the case with them "that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters "-if those whose eyes by day and night are employed in gazing on the mighty deep, see so little of its inhabitants -how aptly may the questions which were propounded to Job be now asked of the wisest of naturalists: "Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?"

Again, we must bear in mind that whatever is opposed to, or beyond our finite knowledge, is too often treated with ridicule. There is scarcely a discovery in the whole range of science, the author of which was not absolutely persecuted as an empiric; and so it has been, and still is, with discoveries in nature. How long the character of that great man, Bruce, was impugned, because he stated that he had seen steaks cut off the living bullock, and the animal afterward driven on its journey! How commonly the fact of gathering oysters from the branches of trees is doubted, even when stated by those who have eaten them; and this, too, at a time when superstitious fables, such as Romish mock miracles, are believed by millions! It reminds one of the old story of the poor woman, questioning her son as to what he had seen in foreign lands, when he returned from his first long voyage. "Seen, mother?" exclaimed the lad; "why, mountains of sugar, rivers of rum, and fishes that fly!" "Come, come," replied the dame, "mountains of sugar and rivers of rum you may have seen, but fishes that fly! never, never.”

It is now a familiar fact, that geologists have discovered fossil remains of former inhabitants of the land, which in point of magnitude reduce the largest of the present known living animals to mere pigmies; but before the fossil remains of the iguanodon, for example, were discovered, how absurd it appeared to talk of a reptile of the lizard tribe having existed sixty or seventy feet in length, and of such colossal dimensions as to require thigh bones larger than those of an elephant to support its bulky carcass; and yet such is the description of this reptile by the late Dr. Mantell, and nobody disputes his accuracy.