"For this bold youth must not his father | Salutes the Chiefs, and views on every side, know, Each must confront the other as his foe,Such is my vengeance! With unhallowed rage, Father and Son shall dreadful battle wage! Unknown the youth shall Rustem's force withstand, The lengthening ranks with various arms supplied. The march begins-the brazen drums resound,' His moving thousands hide the trembling ground; For Persia's verdant land he wields the spear, And soon o'erwhelm the bulwark of the And blood and havoc mark his groaning rear.' To check the Invader's horror-spreading land. Rustem removed, the Persian throne is ours, Will rend his soul, and 'midst his sacred grief, Káús in vain will supplicate relief." course, The barrier-fort opposed unequal force; The stay of Persia, men to battle trained. The tutored chiefs advance with speed, and Vaunting he spoke,-" What hostile force is bring Imperial presents to the future king;' A golden crown, and throne, whose jewels bright Gleam in the sun, and shed a sparkling light. A letter too the crafty tyrant sends, And fraudful thus the glorious aim commends. "If Persia's spoils invite thee to the field, veys The regal vest, the throne's irradiant blaze, here? What Chieftain dares our war-like realms in vade?" "And who art thou?" Sohráb indignant said, Rushing towards him with undaunted look"Hast thou, audacious! nerve and soul to brook The crocodile in fight, that to the strife To this the foe replied-"A Túrk and I Have never yet been bound in friendly tie; And soon thy head shall, severed by my sword, Gladden the sight of Persia's mighty lord, While thy torn limbs to vultures shall be given, The golden crown, the steeds, the sumptuous Or bleach beneath the parching blast of load Of ten strong camels, craftily bestowed; 1 Amongst the nations of the East, nothing can be done without presents between the parties, whether the negotiation be of a political, commercial, or of a domestic nature. Homer speaks of presents, but they are only proffered conditionally, as in the Iliad, where Ulysses and Ajax endeavor to conciliate Achilles. Ten weighty talents of the purest gold, And twice ten vases of refulgent mould; Twelve steeds unmatched in fleetness and in force, And still victorious in the dusty course, All these, to buy his friendship, shall be paid. Pope, Iliad, ix. 122. But in the East, the presents precede the negotiation. heaven." The youthful hero laughing hears the boast,* And now by each continual spears are tost, 2 Kus is a tymbal, or large brass drum, which is beat in the palaces or camps of Eastern Princes. 3 It appears throughout the Sháh Námeh that whenever any army was put in motion, the inhabitants and the country, whether hostile or friendly, were equally given up to plunder and devastation. "Everything in their progress was burnt and destroyed." The circumstances in Sohráb's first encounter somewhat resemble the first engagement of young Ascanius with the boaster Numanus. Virgil, Eneid, ix. 592. Mingling together; like a flood of fire Seems like a mountain moving from its base;' To try the chance of fight. In shining arms, "Come to my victor-toils, another prize!" Never escaped even bird upon the wing; And quick dismounting, on his heaving Furious he burned, and high his buckler held, breast Triumphant stands, his Khunjer firmly prest, Trembling, for life, the craven boaster prayed. And sent to Húmán, who amazed beheld Her tulip cheek with deeper crimson glowed: To ward the storm, by growing force impell'd ; Driven on the youth with persevering might— Reins in his steed, then rushes on the foe; And, gathering strength, his pointed javelin Firm through her girdle belt the weapon went, Beneath her helm her clustering locks she Yet unsubdued, she cut the spear in two, placed ; Poised in her hand an iron javelin gleamed, Accoutred thus in manly guise, no eye 1 The simile of a moving mountain occurs in the Iliad. Hector, with his white plumes, is compared to a moving mountain topt with snow. Book xiii. 754. But Virgil has added considerably to this image. The Trojan hero moves towards Turnus. Quantus Athos, aut quantus Eryx, aut ipse coruscis And from her side the quivering fragment drew, Then gain'd her seat, and onward urged her But strong and fleet Sohráb arrests her speed: | He cries, "A woman, from the Persian host! And round her waist the twisted loop he "Now seek not to escape," he sharply said, "Such is the fate of war, unthinking maid! And, as such beauty seldom swells our pride, Vain thy attempt to cast my toils aside." laid, Yield no defence, and thou a captive maid, In this extreme, but one resource remained, | When these proud walls, in dust and ruins Only one remedy her hope sustained,— Expert in wiles each siren-art she knew, And thence exposed her blooming face to view; Raising her full black orbs, serenely bright, In all her charms she blazed before his sight;' And thus addressed Sohráb: "O warrior brave, Hear me, and thy imperiled honor save, These curling tresses seen by either host, A woman conquered, whence the glorious boast?? Quick she replied: "O'er Persia's fertile fields The savage Túrk in vain his falchion wields; Thy startled troops will know, with inward And not one man of all thy host remain. grief, A woman's arm resists their towering chief, move The wildest transports of ungoverned love. Safe with her friends, escaped from brand and spear, Smiling she stands, as if unknown to fear. Now from the walls, she, with majestic air, Stern he rejoins: "Thou beauteous tyrant; say, Though crown'd with charms, devoted to betray, 'Gurd-afrid, engaging Sohráb, is exactly the Clorinda of Tasso engaging Tancred, in the third Canto of Gerusalemme Liberata. "Namque, etsi nullum memorabile nomen Femines in pœna est, nec habet victoria laudem. Eneid, ii. 583. Alas! that bravery, high as thine, should meet Thus to be scorned, defrauded of his prey, To-morrow shall behold a sterner fray; There, at a distance from the hostile power, DAY AND NIGHT. FIRDAUSI. [Asadi, believed to have been the teacher of Firdausí, was one of the most celebrated poets at the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, lived about A. D. 920. The Sultan often begged him to undertake the work of writing the "Shahnama," or "Book of Kings," afterwards so well done by Firdausí, but Asadi always excused himself on account of his age. Curiously enough, he is said to have outlived Firdausí, and to have written the last four thousand couplets of the "Shahnama" for him. One story is that Firdausí, on his departure from Ghazni, requested Asadi to finish the work, and that Asadi composed that part of his poem between the Arabian conquest of Eastern Persia under the Khalif Omar to the end. Another story, taken from the "Atash Kada," is to the effect that when Firdausi was on his death-bed in Tus, he sent for Asadi, and said, "Master, some of the 'Shahnama remains unfinished, and I fear that when I am gone nobody will complete it." Asadi replied, "My son, be | Hence, worldly lore! By whom is wisdom not grieved; if I live, I will finish it." Firdausí re shown? joined, "You are old, and can scarcely do so." Asadi, The Eternal knows, knows all, and knows however, composed in two days four thousand couplets, and showed them to Firdausí, who was much pleased, and praised him greatly for the work. It is to be inferred from the above that Asadi did assist Firdausi in his great work some time or other, but under what exact circumstances it is impossible to say. The date of this poet's death is unknown. The following is an extract from his celebrated poem on the dispute between Day and Night, given in Costello's "Rose Garden of Persia" (London, 1845):] "Day can but paint the skies with blue, LIFE A FLEETING SHOW.1 All we see, above, around, Or the beams of houris' eyes; In vast life's unbounded tide They alone content may gain, Who can good from ill divide, Or in ignorance abide; All between is restless pain. Before Thy presence, Power Divine, The world is Thine, from Thee it rose, 1See page 337, Vol. VII. alone. OMAR KHAYAM, died A. D. 1123. LIFE IN BOHEMIA. [Henry Murger, born in Paris, 1822, died in Paris, 1861. His name is inextricably bound up with the artistic land of Bohemia, of which he constituted himself the historian; the gay, joyous, careless, laughter-loving, youthful region where illusions are at highwater mark, ambitions lofty, and resources low, where dwell the elected of genius as yet unknown to fame. Though not unfamiliar to other countries, Bohemia proper only exists and is only possible in Paris, where life is blithe and bright, where the people by nature possess a light-heartedness gracefully combined with a substratum of sound common sense. Both Murger's life and his writings personify and reflect a certain aspect of French, or, more correctly speaking, Parisian, existence. Born in the lodge of a concierge, Murger was nursed on the knees of Malibran, who sang to him and awakened his love of music and verse. He had to work his way uphill along the thorny declivities only too familiar to those who are not aided by money or connection upon this arduous path. He did what he could-all was grist that came to his mill in the shape of work; and when the detached sketches of Bohemian life, which he had published in a daily paper, met with success, and made him an author in request, perhaps no one was more astonished than Murger himself. For some little time he continued in his self-made groove, then he tried to attain the due gravity of the Revue des Deux Mondes; but this was not his proper sphere, and he finally returned to reproduce the old familiar figures of the Bohemian brotherhood. But though these later sketches were good, a bitter sediment seemed to have settled in Murger's inkstand; he could no longer paint these light-hearted youths and maidens with the gracious abandon of his early pen-an ineffable something had vanished from his grasp. Still these other books are by no means to be underrated; only the Vie de Bohème remains Murger's masterpiece, wherein he can be seen at his best and worst. It is a book that must not be measured with the narrow Philistine rule. There is no doubt about it, its heroes are somewhat jovial scapegraces, who, when they have money in hand, squander it recklessly; who do not know how to regulate their desires by the demands of their purse-strings; who cannot balance the debit and credit of their accounts. Their every-day existence is in itself a work of genius, a daily problem which they somehow succeed in solving by the most audacious mathematical devices. They have raised borrowing to an art, and would have extracted money from Harpagon himself. Their lodging is uncertain; sometimes they have a garret to cover their heads, though firing and furniture are often conspicueus by their absence, and the winds of heaven have full play through the broken panes of glass. At other times they are not even so comfortably housed, but live under the starry heavens. One of their number gave his address during a whole summer as the Avenue St. Cloud, the third tree to the left on leaving the Bois de Boulogne, the fifth branch. The future was always embroidering for them a stately academical robe, though it took long to manufacture. Still, in the end, Murger tells us that his heroes became men of more or less repute; for, accord ing to him, the true Bohemians are only those that have the right and real stuff in them. He does not count as such uncomprehended geniuses or idle dogs who adopt art as a cloak for sloth and vice. So that for all their fun and frolic his heroes work seriously. Bohemia, as depicted by Murger, was a result of the French Revolution of 1830, when the profession of art had been elevated into a worship, whose offspring was the romantic movement. Then these young madcaps existed in flesh and blood in the Quartier Latin on the other side of the Seine. The Vie de Bohème has been called the students' Breviary, in which they learnt to love and to forget, to suffer and be healed; from which they extracted the secret of preserving buoyant promises; he died of exhaustion in the month of March, 1844, in the Hospital St. Louis, Ward St. Victoire, bed No. 14. I knew Jacques in the hospital, where I was myself detained by a prolonged illness. Mademoiselle Francine had been Jacques' sole and only sweetheart; he did not, however, die old, for he was scarcely twenty-three years of age. This love-story was told to me by Jacques himself, when he was No. 14 and I No. 16 of the Ward St. Victoire-an ugly spot in which to die. Jacques and Francine had met in a house in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, where they had both taken lodgings in the same April quarter. The artist and the young girl were a whole week before they entered into those neighborly relations into which dwellers on the same floor are almost always forced; yet, without having ever exchanged a word, they already knew one another. Francine knew that her neighbor was a poor devil of an artist, and Jacques had heard that his neighbor was a little dressmaker, who had left her family to escape the unkind treatment of her stepmother. She performed miracles of economy to make both ends meet, as it is called; and as she had never known any pleasures, she did not covet them. This is how it came about that they broke charming style, so that an air of unreality pervades One evening in the month of April through the restraint of the partition-wall. hearts amid all privations; from which they learnt how to struggle and remain hopeful and courageous. It is a book both gay and sad. It shows the miseries of the human lot when it has to tussle with poverty; but the picture is drawn by a hand that poetised all it touched. It is a poem of merry misery told in prose. Its sombrer aspects are softened by a gentle heart and a the whole we read, laugh, enjoy, weep, but we take nothing too much au grand sérieux. The quintessence of youth is preserved in Murger's writings, and we judge its follies with a tender smile. In the Vie de Bohème Murger painted the life he was daily leading: it was written from day to day, and therefore tears, laughter, want, discouragement, success, alternate as they do in daily life. Rodolphe, the man of letters in this Bohemian brotherhood, was Murger himself, under a slight disguise. Each chapter stands alone, and is complete in itself. As a whole, it would not bear translation into English; it is too un-English in thought and feeling, too foreign to English ideas to adapt itself to our tongue. It is full of slang, too, the slang of the Parisian studio and editorial office. Yet a few specimens can be culled from it that will give in turn a notion of Murger's pathos and tenderness, his drollery and ingenuity.] HELEN ZIMMERN. FRANCINE'S MUFF. Among the true Bohemians of the true Bohemia, I once knew one named Jacques D; he was a sculptor, and gave promise of showing talent some day. But misery did not give him time to fulfil these Jacques returned home worn out with fatigue, having fasted since the morning, and intensely sad with that vague sadness which has no exact cause, which comes over us anywhere, at any time-a sort of apoplexy of the heart, to which those unfortunate beings who live alone are particularly subject. Jacques, feeling stifled in his narrow cell, opened the window to breathe a little. The evening was fine, and the setting sun was displaying its melancholy enchantments on the hills of Montmartre. Jacques remained pensively at his casement, listening to the winged choir of springtime harmonies singing in the quiet of eve, and that increased his sadness. Seeing a croaking raven fly before him, he thought of the time when ravens brought bread to Elijah; and he said to himself that ravens are not so charitable now. Then, able to endure this no longer, he closed the window, drew the curtain, and, since he had no money to buy oil for his lamp, he lighted a candle of resin that he had brought back with |