sweet breath of flowers,
    And music that awoke the silent hours,
    It was the BEARA FESTIVAL and feast
    When proud and lowly, loftiest and least,
    Matron and Moslem maiden pay their vows,
    With impetratory and votive gift,
    And to the Moslem Jonas bent their brows.
    Each brought her floating lamp of flowers, and swift
    A thousand lights along the current drift,
    Till the vast bosom of the swollen stream,
    Glittering and gliding onward like a dream,
    Seems a wide mirror of the starry sphere
    Or more as if the stars had dropt from air,
    And in an earthly heaven were shining here,
    And far above were, but reflected there
    Still group on group, advancing to the brink,
    As group on group retired link by link;
    For one pale lamp that floated out of view
    Five brighter ones they quickly placed anew;
    At length the slackening multitudes grew less,
    And the lamps floated scattered and apart. 
    As stars grow few when morning’s footsteps press
    When a slight girl, shy as the timid halt,
    Not far from where we stood, her offering brought. 
    Singing a low sweet strain, with lips untaught. 
    Her song proclaimed, that ’twas not many hours
    Since she had left her childhood’s innocent home;
    And now with Beara lamp, and wreathed flowers,
    To propitiate heaven, for wedded bliss had come”

To these lines Mrs. Carshore (who has been in this country, I believe, from her birth, and who ought to know something of Indian customs) appends the following notes.

“It was the Beara festival.”  Much has been said about the Beara or floating lamp, but I have never yet seen a correct description.  Moore mentions that Lalla Rookh saw a solitary Hindoo girl bring her lamp to the river.  D.L.R. says the same, whereas the Beara festival is a Moslem feast that takes place once a year in the monsoons, when thousands of females offer their vows to the patron of rivers.

“Moslem Jonas” Khauj Khoddir is the Jonas of the Mussulman; he, like the prophet of Nineveh, was for three days inside a fish, and for that reason is called the patron of rivers.”

I suppose Mrs. Carshore alludes, in the first of these notes, to the following passage in the prose part of Lalla Rookh:—­

“As they passed along a sequestered river after sunset, they saw a young Hindoo girl upon the bank whose employment seemed to them so strange that they stopped their palanquins to observe her.  She had lighted a small lamp, filled with oil of cocoa, and placing it in an earthern dish, adorned with a wreath of flowers, had committed it with a trembling hand to the stream:  and was now anxiously watching its progress down the current, heedless of the gay cavalcade which had drawn up beside her.  Lalla Rookh was all curiosity;—­when one of her attendants, who had lived upon the banks of the Ganges,