Title:  Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp

Author:  John Payne

Release Date:  February, 2004 [EBook #5100] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 25, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Alaeddin and the enchanted lamp;

Zein Ul Asnam and the King of the Jinn: 
Two Stories Done into English from the Recently
Discovered Arabic Text

by John Payne

London 1901

To
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, K.C.M.G.,
H.B.M.  Consul, trieste.

My Dear Burton,

I give myself the pleasure of placing your name in the forefront of another and final volume of my translation of the Thousand and One Nights, which, if it have brought me no other good, has at least been the means of procuring me your friendship.

Believe me,

Yours always,

John Payne.

Twelve years this day,—­a day of winter, dreary
With drifting snows, when all the world seemed dead
To Spring and hope,—­it is since, worn and weary
Of doubt within and strife without, I fled

From the mean workday miseries of existence,
From spites that slander and from hates that lie,
Into the dreamland of the Orient distance
Under the splendours of the Syrian sky,

And in the enchanted realms of Eastern story,
Far from the lovelessness of modern times,

Garnered the rainbow-remnants of old glory
That linger yet in those ancestral climes;

And now, the tong task done, the journey over,
From that far home of immemorial calms,
Where, as a mirage, on the sky-marge hover
The desert and its oases of palms,

Lingering, I turn me back, with eyes reverted
To this stepmother world of daily life,
As one by some long pleasant dream deserted,
That wakes anew to dull unlovely strife: 

Yet, if non’ other weal the quest have wrought me. 
The long beloved labour now at end,
This gift of gifts the untravelled East hath brought me,
The knowledge of a new and valued friend.

5th Feb. 1889.

INTRODUCTION.

I.