his thought:--

"In vain, therefore, with wistful eyes
Gazing up hither, the poor man
Who loiters by the high-heaped booths
Below there in the Registan

"Says: 'Happy he who lodges there!
With silken raiment, store of rice,
And, for this drought, all kinds of fruits,
Grape-syrup, squares of colored ice,

"'With cherries served in drifts of snow.'
In vain hath a king power to build
Houses, arcades, enamelled mosques,
And to make orchard-closes filled

"With curious fruit trees brought from far,
With cisterns for the winter rain;
And, in the desert, spacious inns
In divers places;--if that pain

"Is not more lightened which he feels,
If his will be not satisfied:
And that it be not from all time
The law is planted, to abide."--pp. 47-8.

The author applies this basis of fixity in nature generally to the
rules of man's nature, and avow himself a Quietist. Yet he would not
despond, but contents himself, and waits. In no poem of the volume is
this character more clearly defined and developed than in the sonnets
"To a Republican Friend," the first of which expresses concurrence in
certain broad progressive principles of humanity: to the second we
would call the reader's attention, as to an example of the author's
more firm and serious writing:--

"Yet when I muse on what life is, I seem
Rather to patience prompted than that proud
Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud;
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme:--
Seeing this vale, this earth whereon we dream,
Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high
Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.
Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,
When, bursting thro' the net-work superposed
By selfish occupation--plot and plan,
Lust, avarice, envy,--liberated man,
All difference with his fellow-man composed,
Shall be left standing face to face with God."--p. 57.

In the adjuration entitled "Stagyrus," already mentioned, he prays to
be set free

"From doubt, where all is double,
Where Faiths are built on dust;"

and there seems continually recurring to him a haunting presage of
the unprofitableness of the life, after which men have not "any more
a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun." Where he
speaks of resignation, after showing