"My feast is now of the Tooba Tree, "Farewel ye vanishing flowers, that shone "In my fairy wreath, so bright and brief, - "Joy, joy for ever! - my task is done - 2 The tree Tooba, that stands in Paradise, in the palace of Mahomet. v. Sale's Prelim. Disc. Touba, says D'Herbelot, signifies beatitude, or eternal happiness. 2 Mahomet is described, in the 53d Chapter of the Koran, as having seen the angel Gabriel "by the lote-tree, beyond which there is no passing: near it is the Garden of Eternal Abode." This tree, say the commentators, stands in the seventh Heaven, on the right hand of the Throne of God. 66 AND this," said the Great Chamberlain, "is poetry ! this flimsy manufacture of the brain, which, in comparison with the lofty and durable monuments of genius, is as the gold filigree-work of Zamara beside the eternal architecture of Egypt !" After this gorgeous sentence, which, with a few more of the same kind, FADLADEEN kept by him for rare and important occa sions, he proceeded to the anatomy of the short poem just recited. The lax and easy kind of metre in which it was written ought to be denounced, he said, as one of the leading causes of the alarming growth of poetry in our times. If some check were not given to this lawless facility, we should soon be overrun by a race of bards as numerous and as shallow as the hundred and twenty thousand Streams of Basra. They who succeeded in this style deserved chastisement for their "It is said that the rivers or streams of Basra were reckoned in the time of Belal ben Abi Bordeh, and amounted to the number of one hundred and twenty thousand streams." - Ebn Haukal. M very success; as warriors have been punished, even after gaining a victory, because they had taken the liberty of gaining it in an irregular or unestablished manner. What, then, was to be said to those who failed? to those who presumed, as in the present lamentable instance, to imitate the license and ease of the bolder sons of song, without any of that grace or vigour which gave a dignity even to negligence ; -who, like them, flung the jereed' carelessly, but not, like them, to the mark ; — “ and who," said he, raising his voice to excite a proper degree of wakefulness in his hearers, "contrive to appear heavy and constrained in the midst of all the latitude they have allowed themselves, like one of those young pagans that dance before the Princess, who has the ingenuity to move as if her limbs were fettered, in a pair of the lightest and loosest drawers of Masulipatam !" It was but little suitable, he continued, to the grave march of criticism to follow this fantastical Peri, of 2 The name of the javelin with which the Easterns exercise, v. Castellan, Moeurs des Othomans, tom. iii. p. 161. whom they had just heard, through all her flights and adventures between earth and heaven, but he could not help adverting to the puerile conceitedness of the Three Gifts which she is supposed to carry to the skies, drop of blood, forsooth, a sigh, and a tear! How the first of these articles was delivered into the Angel's "radiant hand" he professed himself at a loss to discover; and as to the safe carriage of the sigh and the tear, such Peris and such poets were beings by far too incomprehensible for him even to guess how they managed such matters. "But, in short," said he, "it is a waste of time and patience to dwell longer upon a thing so incurably frivolous, puny even among its own puny race, and such as only the Banyan Hospital for Sick Insects should undertake." 3 In vain did LALLA ROOKH try to soften this inexorable critic; in vain did she resort to her most eloquent common-places, reminding him that poets 3 For a description of this Hospital of the Banyans, v. Parsons's Travels, p. 262. were a timid and sensitive race, whose sweetness was not to be drawn forth, like that of the fragrant grass near the Ganges, by crushing and trampling upon them; that severity often destroyed every chance of the perfection which it demanded; and that, after all, perfection was like the Mountain of the Talisman, no one had ever yet reached its summit. + Neither these gentle axioms, nor the still gentler looks with which they were inculcated, could lower for one instant the elevation of FADLADEEN's eyebrows, or charm him into any thing like encouragement or even toleration of her poet. Toleration, indeed, was not among the weaknesses of FADLADEEN: he carried the same spirit into matters of poetry and of religion, and, though little versed in the beauties or sublimities of either, was a perfect master of the art of persecution in both. His zeal, too, was the same in either pursuit ; whether the game before him was pagans or poetasters, worshippers of cows, or writers of epics. 4 "Near this is a curious hill, called Koh Talism, the Mountain of the Talisman, because, according to the traditions of the country, no person ever succeeded in gaining its summit." - Kinneir. |