“Then they who stood about the king
    Drew close together and conferred;
  Till that the king stood forth and said: 
    ‘Before the priests thou shalt be heard.’

  “But, when the Ulema were met
    And the thing heard, they doubted not;
  But sentenced him, as the law is,
    To die by stoning on the spot.

  “Now the king charged us secretly: 
    ’Stoned must he be:  the law stands so: 
  Yet, if he seek to fly, give way;
    Forbid him not, but let him go.’

  “So saying, the king took a stone,
    And cast it softly:  but the man,
  With a great joy upon his face,
    Kneeled down, and cried not, neither ran.

  “So they whose lot it was cast stones,
    That they flew thick and bruised him sore: 
  But he praised Allah with loud voice,
    And remained kneeling as before.

  “My lord had covered up his face: 
    But, when one told him, ‘He is dead;’
  Turning him quickly to go in,
    ‘Bring thou to me his corpse,’ he said.

  “And truly, while I speak, oh king,
    I hear the bearers on the stair. 
  Wilt thou they straightway bring him in?—­
    Ho! enter ye who tarry there.”—­pp. 39-43.

The Vizier counsels the king that each man’s private grief suffices him, and that he should not seek increase of it in the griefs of other men.  But he answers him, (this passage we have before quoted,) that the king’s lot and the poor man’s is the same, for that neither has his will; and he takes order that the dead man be buried in his own royal tomb.

We know few poems the style of which is more unaffectedly without labor, and to the purpose, than this.  The metre, however, of the earlier part is not always quite so uniform and intelligible as might be desired; and we must protest against the use, for the sake of rhyme, of broke in lieu of broken, as also of stole for stolen in “the New Sirens.”  While on the subject of style, we may instance, from the “Fragment of an Antigone,” the following uncouth stanza, which, at the first reading, hardly appears to be correctly put together: 

    “But hush!  Hoemon, whom Antigone,
  Robbing herself of life in burying,
    Against Creon’s laws, Polynices,
  Robs of a loved bride, pale, imploring,
      Waiting her passage,
  Forth from the palace hitherward comes.”—­p. 30.

Perhaps the most perfect and elevated in tone of all these poems is “The New Sirens.”  The author addresses, in imagination, a company of fair women, one of whose train he had been at morning; but in the evening he has dreamed under the cedar shade, and seen the same forms “on shores and sea-washed places,” “With blown tresses, and with beckoning hands.”

He thinks how at sunrise he had beheld those ladies playing between the vines; but now their warm locks have fallen down over their arms.  He prays them to speak and shame away his sadness; but there comes only a broken gleaming from their windows, which “Reels and shivers on the ruffled gloom.”  He asks them whether they have seen the end of all this, the load of passion and the emptiness of reaction, whether they dare look at life’s latter days,