He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover, has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial.  Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz, for the name’s sake.  A law or statute is to him what a fence is to a nimble schoolboy,—­a temptation for a jump.  “We would do nothing but good; else would shame come to us on the day when the soul must hie hence;—­and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris themselves would forsake that, and come out to us.”

His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader.  There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all materials.  Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion.  He fears nothing, he stops for nothing.  Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cup-bearer.  This boundless charter is the right of genius.  “No evil fate,” said Beethoven, “can befall my music, and he to whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness which the others drag about with them.”

We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz.  Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban.  But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch.  It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics.  Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence.  These are the natural topics and language of his wit and perception.  But it is the play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world.  Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:—­“Bring wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul’s independence, what is sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?”—­and sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:—­

  “I am:  what I am
  My dust will be again.”

A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelligence.  In all poetry, Pindar’s rule holds,—­[Greek:  sunetois phonei], it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot’s, or, as at other times, with an eagle’s quill.