to think of death—­to leave all these goods behind thee?” ’Attar replied that he hoped and believed that he should die as contentedly as any dervish; upon which the aged devotee, saying, “We shall see,” placed his wooden bowl upon the ground, laid his head upon it, and, calling on the name of God, immediately resigned his soul.  Deeply impressed with this incident, ’Attar at once gave up his shop, and devoted himself to the study of Sufi philosophy.[22]

   [21] The Sufis are the mystics of Islam, and their poetry,
        while often externally anacreontic—­bacchanalian and
        erotic—­possesses an esoteric, spiritual signification: 
        the sensual world is employed to symbolise that which is
        to be apprehended only by the inward sense.  Most of
        the great poets of Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey are
        generally understood to have been Sufis.

   [22] Sir Gore Ouseley’s Biographical Notices of Persian Poets.

The death of Cardinal Mazarin furnishes another remarkable illustration of Saadi’s sentiment.  A day or two before he died, the cardinal caused his servant to carry him into his magnificent art gallery, where, gazing upon his collection of pictures and sculpture, he cried in anguish, “And must I leave all these?” Dr. Johnson may have had Mazarin’s words in mind when he said to Garrick, while being shown over the famous actor’s splendid mansion:  “Ah, Davie, Davie, these are the things that make a death-bed terrible!”

Few passages of Shakspeare are more admired than these lines: 

And this our life, exempt from public haunts,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.[23]

[23] Cf. these lines, from Herrick’s “Hesperides”: 

But you are lovely leaves, where we
May read, how soon things have
Their end, tho’ ne’er so brave;
And after they have shown their pride,
Like you, a while, they glide
Into the grave.

Saadi had thus expressed the same sentiment before him:  “The foliage of a newly-clothed tree, to the eye of a discerning man, displays a whole volume of the wondrous works of the Creator.”  Another Persian poet, Jami, in his beautiful mystical poem of Yusuf wa Zulaykha, says:  “Every leaf is a tongue uttering praises, like one who keepeth crying, ‘In the name of God.’"[24] And the Afghan poet Abdu ’r-Rahman says:  “Every tree, every shrub, stands ready to bend before him; every herb and blade of grass is a tongue to mutter his praises.”  And Horace Smith, that most pleasing but unpretentious writer, both of verse and prose, has thus finely amplified the idea of “tongues in trees”: 

Your voiceless lips, O Flowers, are living preachers,
Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book,
Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers,

                                From loneliest nook.