“There resides in the grieving
A poison to kill;
Beware to go near them
’Tis pestilent still.”

Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords,—­and this is foreseen:—­

  “I will be drunk and down with wine;
  Treasures we find in a ruined house.”

Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that covers it:—­

  “To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs,
  Bring bands of wine for the stupid head.”

    “The Builder of heaven
      Hath sundered the earth,
    So that no footway
      Leads out of it forth.

    “On turnpikes of wonder
      Wine leads the mind forth,
    Straight, sidewise, and upward,
      West, southward, and north.

    “Stands the vault adamantine
      Until the Doomsday;
    The wine-cup shall ferry
      Thee o’er it away.”

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an object of interest, and his every phrase and syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.

His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips.  “Loose the knots of the heart,” he says.  We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth.  An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom.  But a large utterance, a river, that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with great arteries,—­this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and gratification.  The difference is not so much in the quality of men’s thoughts as in the power of uttering them.  What is pent and smouldered in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new form, at once relief and creation.

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought.  We accept the religions and politics into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles,—­that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own.  It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.

Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows.

  “Let us draw the cowl through the brook of
       wine.”