The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter, and the bird is on the wing.

"Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon,
Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
The wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The leaves of life keep falling one by one.

Morning a thousand roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the rose of yesterday?
And this first summer-month that brings the rose
Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.

"Well, let it take them! What have we to do
With Kaikobád the Great or Kaikhosrú?

Let Rustum cry, 'To battle!' as he likes,
Or Hatim Tai, 'To supper!'- heed not you.
"With me along the strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of slave and sultan is forgot,
And peace to Máhmúd on his golden throne!

"They say the lion and the lizard keep

The courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahrám, that great hunter, the wild ass
Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep.

"The palace that to heaven his pillars threw,
And kings the forehead on his threshold.drew,
I saw the solitary ringdove there,

And Coo, coo, coo,' she cried; and Coo, coo, coo.'

"Ah! my beloved, fill the cup that clears
To-day of past regret and future fears;

To-morrow! Why, to-morrow I may be
Myself with yesterday's seven thousand years.
"For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his vintage rolling Time has prest,

Have drunk their cup a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.

"And we that now make merry in the room
They left, and summer dresses in new bloom,
Ourselves must we beneath the couch of earth
for whom?
Descend, ourselves to make a couch

"This quatrain Mr. Binning found inscribed by some stray hand among

the

ruins of Persepolis. The ringdove's ancient Péhlevi, Coo, coo, coo, signifies also in

And many knots unravelled by the road; But not the master-knot of human fate.

"There was the door to which I found no key: There was the veil through which I could not see : Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE

There was, and then no more of THEE and ME.

"Earth could not answer, nor the seas that mourn In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn ;

Nor Heaven, with those eternal signs revealed And hidden by the sleeve of night and morn.

"Then of the THEE IN ME who works behind The veil of universe I cried to find

A lamp to guide me through the darkness; and Something then said, 'An understanding blind.' "Then to the lip of this poor earthen urn

I leaned, the secret well of life to learn:

And lip to lip it murmured, 'While you live, 'Drink! for, once dead, you never shall return.'

"I think the vessel, that with fugitive Articulation answered, once did live

And drink; and that impassive lip I kissed, How many kisses might it take - and give!

Of earth, and up to heaven's unopening door,
You gaze to-day, while you are you, how then
To-morrow, when you shall be you no more?

"O, plagued no more with human or divine,
To-morrow's tangle to itself resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The cypress-slender minister of wine.

"Waste not your hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of this and that endeavor and dispute;
Better be merry with the fruitful grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter fruit.

"The grape
that can with logic absolute
The two-and-seventy jarring sects confute :
The sovereign alchemist that in a trice
Life's leaden metal into gold transmute."

"Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us passed the door of darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road,
Which to discover we must travel too.

"The revelations of devout and learned
Who rose before us, and as prophets burned,
Are all but stories which, awoke from sleep
They told their fellows, and to sleep returned."

"I sent my soul through the invisible Some letter of that after-life to spell :

And after many days my soul returned

1

And said, Behold, myself am Heaven and Hell.'

"Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, And hell the shadow of a soul on fire,

Cast on the darkness into which ourselves, So late emerged from, shall so soon expire."

We are no other than a moving row

Of visionary shapes that come and go

Round with this sun-illumined lantern held
In midnight by the master of the show.

"Impotent pieces of the game he plays
Upon this checker-board of nights and days,
Hither and thither moves and checks and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.

"The ball no question makes of ayes and noes,
But right or left, as strikes the player, goes;
And he that tossed you down into the field,
He knows about it all, he knows, He knows!

"With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed:

And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

"Yesterday this day's madness did prepare, To-morrow's silence, triumph, or despair:

Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

"But this I know whether the one true light
Kindle to love, or wrath consume me quite,
One flash of it within the tavern caught
Better than in the temple lost outright."

"What! out of senseless nothing to provoke
A conscious something to resent the yoke
Of unpermitted pleasure, under pain
Of everlasting penalties if broke!

"What! from his helpless creature be repaid
Pure gold for what he lent as dross allayed, —