Unto the Sun with deep salaams
  The Parsee spreads his morning palms
  (A beacon blazing on a height
  Warms o’er his piety by night.)
  The Moslem deprecates the deed,
  Cuts off the head that holds the creed,
  Then reverently goes to grass,
  Muttering thanks to Balaam’s Ass
  For faith and learning to refute
  Idolatry so dissolute! 
  But should a maniac dash past,
  With straws in beard and hands upcast,
  To him (through whom, whene’er inclined
  To preach a bit to Madmankind,
  The Holy Prophet speaks his mind)
  Our True Believer lifts his eyes
  Devoutly and his prayer applies;
  But next to Solyman the Great
  Reveres the idiot’s sacred state. 
  Small wonder then, our worthy mute
  Was held in popular repute. 
  Had he been blind as well as mum,
  Been lame as well as blind and dumb,
  No bard that ever sang or soared
  Could say how he had been adored. 
  More meagerly endowed, he drew
  An homage less prodigious.  True,
  No soul his praises but did utter—­
  All plied him with devotion’s butter,
  But none had out—­’t was to their credit—­
  The proselyting sword to spread it. 
  I state these truths, exactly why
  The reader knows as well as I;
  They’ve nothing in the world to do
  With what I hope we’re coming to
  If Pegasus be good enough
  To move when he has stood enough. 
  Egad! his ribs I would examine
  Had I a sharper spur than famine,
  Or even with that if ’twould incline
  To examine his instead of mine. 
  Where was I?  Ah, that silent man
  Who dwelt one time in Ispahan—­
  He had a name—­was known to all
  As Meerza Solyman Zingall.

  There lived afar in Astrabad,
  A man the world agreed was mad,
  So wickedly he broke his joke
  Upon the heads of duller folk,
  So miserly, from day to day,
  He gathered up and hid away
  In vaults obscure and cellars haunted
  What many worthy people wanted,
  A stingy man!—­the tradesmen’s palms
  Were spread in vain:  “I give no alms
  Without inquiry”—­so he’d say,
  And beat the needy duns away. 
  The bastinado did, ’tis true,
  Persuade him, now and then, a few
  Odd tens of thousands to disburse
  To glut the taxman’s hungry purse,
  But still, so rich he grew, his fear
  Was constant that the Shah might hear. 
  (The Shah had heard it long ago,
  And asked the taxman if ’twere so,
  Who promptly answered, rather airish,
  The man had long been on the parish.)
  The more he feared, the more he grew
  A cynic and a miser, too,
  Until his bitterness and pelf
  Made him a terror to himself;
  Then, with a razor’s neckwise stroke,
  He tartly cut his final joke. 
  So perished, not an hour too soon,
  The wicked Muley Ben Maroon.