within this narrow cave?[126] But o’er thy cell I mourn, as thou wast all I loved; and ere my grief shall cease, the grave shall be my friend.  Thou wast agitated like the sand of the desert; but now thou reposest as the water of the lake.  Thou, like the moon, hast disappeared; but, though unseen, the moon is still the same; and now, although thy form from me is hid, still in my breast remains the loved remembrance.  Though far removed beyond my aching sight, still is thy image in my heart beheld.  Thy form is now departed, but grief eternal fills its place.  On thee my soul was fixed, and never will thy memory be forgot.  Thou art gone, and from this wilderness escaped, and now reposest in the bowers of Paradise.  I, too, after some little time will shake off these bonds, and there rejoin thee.  Till then, faithful to the love I vowed, around thy tomb my footsteps will I bend.  Until I come to thee within this narrow cell, pure be thy shroud!  May Paradise everlasting be thy mansion blest!  And be thy soul received into the mercy of thy God!  And may thy spirit by his grace be vivified to all eternity!”

  [125] A mole on the fair face of Beauty is not regarded as a
        blemish, but the very contrary, by Asiatics—­or by
        Europeans either, else why did the ladies of the last
        century patch their faces, if not (originally) to set
        off the clearness of their complexion by contrast with
        the little black wafer?—­though (afterwards) often to
        hide a pimple!  Eastern poets are for ever raving over
        the mole on a pretty face.  Hafiz goes the length of
        declaring: 

“For the mole on the cheek of that girl of Shiraz
I would give away Samarkand and Bukhara”—­

albeit they were none of his to give to anybody.

[126] Cf.  Shelley, in the fine opening of that wonderful
poetical offspring of his adolescence, Queen Mab: 

“Hath, then, the gloomy Power
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres
Seized on her sinless soul?”

* * * * *

“This,” methinks I hear some misogynist exclaim, after reading it—­“this is rank nonsense—­it is stark lunacy!” And so it is, perhaps.  At all events, these impassioned words are supposed to be uttered by a poor youth who had gone mad from love.  Our misogynist—­and may I venture to include the experienced married man?—­will probably retort, that all love between young folks is not only folly but sheer madness; and he will be the more confirmed in this opinion when he learns that, according to certain grave Persian writers, Layla was really of a swarthy visage, and far from being the beauty her infatuated lover conceived her to be:  thus verifying the dictum of our great dramatist, in the ever-fresh passage where he makes “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” to be “of imagination all compact,” the lover seeing “Helen’s beauty in the brow of Egypt!”—­Notwithstanding all this, the ancient legend of Layla and Majnun has proved an inspiring theme to more than one great poet of Persia, during the most flourishing period of the literature of that country—­for which let us all be duly thankful.