court. Omar
Khayyam takes us into its ruins; for one of the friends of his boyhood
days was Nizam al-Mulk, the grandson of that Toghrul the Turk, who with
his Seljuks had supplanted the Persian power. Omar's other friend was
Ibn Sabbah, the "old Man of the Mountain," the founder of the Assassins.
The doings of both worked misery upon Christian Europe, and entailed a
tremendous loss of life during the Crusades. As a sweet revenge, that
same Europe has taken the first of the trio to its bosom, and has made
of Omar Khayyam a household friend. "My tomb shall be in a spot where
the north wind may scatter roses" is said to have been one of Omar's
last wishes. He little thought that those very roses from the tomb in
which he was laid to rest in 1123 would, in the nineteenth century,
grace the spot where his greatest modern interpreter--Fitzgerald--lies
buried in the little English town of Woodbridge!

The author of the famous Quatrains--Omar Ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyam--not
himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths of our own
day--was of the city of Nishapur. The invention of the Rubaiyat, or
Epigram, is not to his credit. That honor belongs to Abu Said of
Khorasan (968-1049), who used it as a means of expressing his mystic
pantheism. But there is an Omar Khayyam club in London--not one bearing
the name of Abu Said. What is the bond which binds the Rubaiyat-maker in
far-off Persia to the literati of modern Anglo-Saxondom?

By his own people Omar was persecuted for his want of orthodoxy; and yet
his grave to this day is held in much honor. By others he was looked
upon as a Mystic. Reading the five hundred or so authentic quatrains one
asks, Which is the real Omar? Is it he who sings of wine and of
pleasure, who seems to preach a life of sensual enjoyment? or is it the
stern preacher, who criticises all, high and low; priest, dervish, and
Mystic--yea, even God himself? I venture to say that the real Omar is
both; or, rather, he is something higher than is adequately expressed in
these two words. The Ecclesiastes of Persia, he was weighed down by the
great questions of life and death and morality, as was he whom people so
wrongly call "the great sceptic of the Bible." The "_Weltschmerz_" was
his, and he fought hard within himself to find that mean way which
philosophers delight in pointing out. If at times Omar does preach
_carpe diem_, if he paint in his exuberant fancy the delights of
carousing, Fitzgerald is right--he