Thought, in the mine, may come forth gold or dross;
  When coined in word, we know its real worth.

He had been thus anticipated by Saadi:  “To what shall be likened the tongue in a man’s mouth?  It is the key of the treasury of wisdom.  When the door is shut, who can discover whether he deals in jewels or small-wares?”

The poet Thomson, in his Seasons, has these lines, which have long been hackneyed: 

                              Loveliness
  Needs not the aid of foreign ornament,
  But is when unadorned adorned the most.

Saadi had anticipated him also:  “The face of the beloved,” he says, “requireth not the art of the tire-woman.  The finger of a beautiful woman and the tip of her ear are handsome without an ear-jewel or a turquoise ring.”  But Saadi, in his turn, was forestalled by the Arabian poet-hero Antar, in his famous Mu’allaka, or prize-poem, which is at least thirteen hundred years old, where he says:  “Many a consort of a fair one, whose beauty required no ornaments, have I laid prostrate on the field.”

Yet one Persian poet, at least, namely, Nakhshabi, held a different opinion:  “Beauty,” he says, “adorned with ornaments, portends disastrous events to our hearts.  An amiable form, ornamented with diamonds and gold, is like a melodious voice accompanied by the rabab.”  Again, he says:  “Ornaments are the universal ravishers of hearts, and an upper garment for the shoulder is like a cluster of gems.  If dress, however,” he concedes, “may have been at any time the assistant of beauty, beauty is always the animator of dress.”  It is remarkable that homely-featured women dress more gaudily than their handsome sisters generally, thus unconsciously bringing their lack of beauty (not to put too fine a point on it) into greater prominence.

In common with other moralists, Saadi reiterates the maxim that learning and virtue, precept and practice, should ever go hand in hand.  “Two persons,” says he, “took trouble in vain:  he who acquired wealth without using it, and he who taught wisdom without practising it.”  Again:  “He who has acquired knowledge and does not practise it, is like unto him that ploughed but did not sow.”  And again:  “How much soever you may study science, when you do not act wisely, you are ignorant.  The beast that they load with books is not profoundly wise and learned:  what knoweth his empty skull whether he carrieth fire-wood or books?” And yet again:  “A learned man without temperance is like a blind man carrying a lamp:  he showeth the way to others, but does not guide himself.”

Ingratitude is denounced by all moralists as the lowest of vices.  Thus Saadi says:  “Man is beyond dispute the most excellent of created beings, and the vilest animal is the dog; but the sages agree that a grateful dog is better than an ungrateful man.  A dog never forgets a morsel, though you pelt him a hundred times with stones.  But if you cherish a mean wretch for an age, he will fight with you for a mere trifle.”  In language still more forcible does a Hindu poet denounce this basest of vices:  “To cut off the teats of a cow;[18] to occasion a pregnant woman to miscarry; to injure a Brahman—­are sins of the most aggravated nature; but more atrocious than these is ingratitude.”