ise a voice
And see what poor apologies are made.
And so they sang, these two, for many days,
And while they sang the rose was beautiful_.

CVII

_But this affected not the songful ones,
And evermore in beauty lived the rose.
And when the worms were old and wiser too,
They fell to silence and humility_.

CVIII

A night of silence! 'Twas the swinging sea
And this our world of darkness. And the twain
Rolled on below the stars; they flung a chain
Around the silences which are in me.

CIX

The shadows come, and they will come to bless
Their brother and his dwelling and his fame,
When I shall soil no more with any blame
Or any praise the silence I possess.

APPENDIX

ON THE NAME ABU'L-ALA

Arab names have always been a stumbling-block, and centuries ago
there was a treatise written which was called "The Tearing of the
Veil from before Names and Patronymics." Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Jarit
al-Misri is a fair example of the nomenclature; here we have the
patronymic (Abu Bakr--father of Bakr), the personal name (Ahmad),
the surname (ibn Jarit--son of Jarit), and the ethnic name
(al-Misri--native of Egypt). In addition, they made use of fancy
names if they were poets (such as Ssorrdorr, the sack of pearls,
who died in the year 1072), names connoting kindred, habitation
(such as Ahmad al-Maidani, the great collector of proverbs, who
lived near the Maidan, the race-course of Naisapur), faith or
trade or personal defects (such as a caliph who was called the
father of flies, since on account of his offensive breath no fly
would rest upon his lip), and finally they gave each other names
of honour (such as sword of the empire, helper of the empire,
etc.). Then the caliph gave, as a distinction, double titles and,
when these became too common, triple titles. ("In this way," says
al-Biruni, "the matter is opposed to sense and clumsy to the last
degree, so that a man who says the titles is fatigued when he has
scarcely started and he runs the risk of being late for prayer.")
. . . The patronymic was, of all of these, the most in favour. At
first it was assumed when the eldest son was born; when Bakr came
into the world his father took the name of Abu Bakr, and acquired
a new importance. This was not by any means peculiar to the
Arabs: "O Queen," says Das, a king of Indian folk-song, "O Queen,
the name of childless has departed from me." When the Arab had no
son, he used an honorific patronymic (such as Abu'