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"Every good action performed on earth is affected by the justice of its rulers.

"His kingdom cannot abound in rectitude, whose counsel is erroneous."

Abaqā-ān highly applauded the above and the preceding verses; [and the Persian biographer adds a remark, that] "in these times none of the learned men or Shaikhs of the age would venture to offer such even to a shopkeeper or butcher; which accounts indeed for the present state of society!"

Translation of J. H. Harington.

SUPPLICATION

From The Garden of Perfume'

Y BODY still trembleth when I call to memory the prayers of one absorbed in ecstasy in the Holy Place,

MY

Who kept exclaiming to God, with many lamentations: Cast me not off, for no one else will take me by the hand! Call me to thy mercy, or drive me from thy door; on thy threshold alone will I rest my head.

Thou knowest that we are helpless and miserable, sunk under the weight of low desires,

And that these rebellious desires rush on with so much impetuosity, that wisdom is unable to check the rein.

For they come on in the spirit and power of Satan; and how can the ant contend with an army of tigers?

O lead me in the way of those who walk in thy way; and from those enemies grant me thy asylum!

By the essence of thy majesty, O God; by thine attributes without comparison or likeness;

By the "Great is God" of the pilgrim in the Holy House; by him who is buried at Yathreb - on whom be peace!

By the shout of the men of the sword, who account their antagonists in the battle as woman;

By the devotion of the aged, tried, and approved; by the purity of the young, just arisen;

In the whirlpool of the last breath, O save us in the last cry from the shame of apostasy!

There is hope in those who have been obedient, that they may be allowed to make intercession for those who have not been obedient.

For the sake of the pure, keep me far from contamination; and if error escape me, hold me excused.

By the aged, whose backs are bowed in obedience, whose eyes, through shame of their past misdeeds, look down upon their feet,

Grant that mine eye may not be blind to the face of happiness; that my tongue may not be mute in bearing witness to the Faith!

Grant that the lamp of Truth may shine upon my path; that my hand may be cut off from committing evil!

Cause mine eyes to be free from blindness; withhold my hand from all that is unseemly.

A mere atom, carried about by the wind, O stay me in thy favor!

Mean as I am, existence and non-existence in me are but one thing.

From the sun of thy graciousness a single ray sufficeth me; for except in thy ray, no one would perceive me.

Look upon my evil; for on whomsoever thou lookest, he is the better; courtesy from a king is enough for the beggar.

If in thy justice and mercy thou receive me, shall I complain that the remission was not promised me?

O God, drive me not out on account of my errors from thy door, for even in imagination I can see no other door.

And if in my ignorance I became for some days a stranger to thee, now that I am returned shut not thy door in my face. What excuse shall I bring for the disgrace of my sensuality, except to plead my weakness before the Rich One?

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rich man is pitiful to him who is poor.

Why weep over my feeble condition?

thee for my refuge.

If I am feeble, I have

O God, we have wasted our lives in carelessness! What can the struggling hand do against the power of Fate?

What can we contrive with all our planning? Our only prop

is apology for our faults.

All that I have done thou hast utterly shattered! strength hath our self-will against the strength of God?

What

My head I cannot withdraw from thy sentence, when once thy sentence hath been passed on my head.

XXII-792

Graf's Text. Translation of S. Robinson.

I

BE CONTENT

From The Rose-Garden>

NEVER complained of the vicissitudes of fortune, nor suffered my face to be overcast at the revolution of the heavens, except once, when my feet were bare and I had not the means of obtaining shoes. I came to the chief mosque of Kufah in a state of much dejection, and saw there a man who had no feet. I returned thanks to God and acknowledged his mercies, and endured my want of shoes with patience, and exclaimed:

STANZA

Roast fowl to him that's sated will seem less
Upon the board than leaves of garden-cress;
While, in the sight of helpless poverty,

Boiled turnip will a roasted pullet be.

Translation of E. B. Eastwick.

CHARLES AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE

(1804-1869)

BY BENJAMIN W. WELLS

HARLES AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE, who was born at Boulognesur-Mer, December 23d, 1804, and died at Paris, October

13th, 1869, was one of the most brilliant French essayists and one of the finest critical minds of the world's literature. He takes in the France of the nineteenth century the place that Dr. Johnson held in the England of the eighteenth; while his culture was as delicate as, and his sympathies wider than, those of Matthew Arnold, with whom it is natural to compare him in our own day. He gave himself so wholly to the humane life, to the joy that he found in books, and to the views of human nature that they opened to him, that his literary studies, his 'Portraits' and Monday Chats,' form his best biography, and almost make superfluous the recollections of his secretaries, Levallois, Pons, and Troubat, or the labored biography of his fellow academician Haussonville. It is worth noting however that his first studies were medical; for it was to this that he attributed "the spirit of philosophy, the love

[graphic]

C. A. SAINTE-BEUVE

of exactness and physiological reality," that always marked his critical method,― even in those first contributions to the Globe, the present 'Premiers Lundis,' where, as he said himself in later years, "youth painted youth."

The landmarks in Sainte-Beuve's uneventful life are his meeting with Victor Hugo in 1827, his election to the Academy in 1845, his nominations as Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1859 and as Senator in 1865. For a half-century he was almost continuously a resident of Paris. Twice he left it, to lecture at Lausanne and at Liège; but wherever he was and whatever his functions,- journal-. ist, professor, senator,- he was always the unwearied "naturalist of human minds," the clear-sighted critic and generous advocate of literary freedom.

To most men, Sainte-Beuve is known as the author of fifteen volumes of Monday Chats' (the 'Causeries du Lundi ') and of their continuation in the thirteen volumes of the New Monday Chats,' the 'Nouveaux Lundis.' And it is for these that he best deserves to be known; but before we turn to an attempt to estimate their qualities and worth, the reader may be reminded that he is also the author of two volumes of poetry (originally three), which are very significant in the history of French prosody, where his signature can often be recognized in the verses of Baudelaire and Banville, and in that of the lyric of democracy as it afterward came to be represented by Manuel and Coppée. He wrote also a novel, 'Volupté,' which found "fit audience though few"; and a History of Port-Royal,' the Jansenist seminary made illustrious by Pascal, of which the seven volumes are a monument of astounding industry and critical acumen. But the 'Monday Chats' by no means exhaust his purely literary work; which under various titles-Literary Critiques and Portraits,' 'Literary Portraits,' 'Contemporary Portraits,' 'Portraits of Women,' 'Châteaubriand and his Literary Group' — makes up a total of from forty to fifty volumes.

This imposing mass is divided by the Revolution of 1848. Before that date he is striving for the critical mastery, but making incursions also into other fields. After his return from Liège in 1849 he is the critical autocrat, always honored though not always beloved. Yet the work of his apprentice years was of great importance in its day. The portraits have not indeed the charm and winning grace of the mature artist who wrote the passages that have been chosen here to illustrate his genius; but they are full of art as well as scholarship, and constructed almost from the very first on the critical lines that he has laid down in his essay on Châteaubriand. To the young Sainte-Beuve is due, more than to any of his contemporaries, the revival of interest in the sixteenth century and in Ronsard. These studies influenced, and for a time guided, the development of romanticism, and stirred in Sainte-Beuve himself a faint poetic flame; but even in verse he was a critic of his own sensations, and wooed a refractory Muse.

With the weekly Monday Chats,' begun in Le Constitutionnel newspaper in 1850, and continued in various journals with but one considerable interruption until his death, began the epoch-making work that will long keep his memory green among all lovers of the humanities. Already he had made criticism a fine art; but he had been too generous in his praise of his fellow romanticists. Now the critical touch became more precise, the shading more exact. Nor was the least remarkable thing about these essays the speed and regularity of their production. Week after week, for year after year,

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