e
Friend, with hearts that are wholly emptied of the dross of this world.'"
His own life was characterized by that same austerity, and evinced that
same simplicity which marked the lives of His beloved companions. "There
was a time in 'Iraq," He Himself affirms, in one of His Tablets, "when the
Ancient Beauty ... had no change of linen. The one shirt He possessed
would be washed, dried and worn again."

"Many a night," continues Nabil, depicting the lives of those
self-oblivious companions, "no less than ten persons subsisted on no more
than a pennyworth of dates. No one knew to whom actually belonged the
shoes, the cloaks, or the robes that were to be found in their houses.
Whoever went to the bazaar could claim that the shoes upon his feet were
his own, and each one who entered the presence of Baha'u'llah could affirm
that the cloak and robe he then wore belonged to him. Their own names they
had forgotten, their hearts were emptied of aught else except adoration
for their Beloved.... O, for the joy of those days, and the gladness and
wonder of those hours!"

The enormous expansion in the scope and volume of Baha'u'llah's writings,
after His return from Sulaymaniyyih, is yet another distinguishing feature
of the period under review. The verses that streamed during those years
from His pen, described as "a copious rain" by Himself, whether in the
form of epistles, exhortations, commentaries, apologies, dissertations,
prophecies, prayers, odes or specific Tablets, contributed, to a marked
degree, to the reformation and progressive unfoldment of the Babi
community, to the broadening of its outlook, to the expansion of its
activities and to the enlightenment of the minds of its members. So
prolific was this period, that during the first two years after His return
from His retirement, according to the testimony of Nabil, who was at that
time living in Ba_gh_dad, the unrecorded verses that streamed from His
lips averaged, in a single day and night, the equivalent of the Qur'an! As
to those verses which He either dictated or wrote Himself, their number
was no less remarkable than either the wealth of material they contained,
or the diversity of subjects to which they referred. A vast, and indeed
the greater, proportion of these writings were, alas, lost irretrievably
to posterity. No less an authority than Mirza Aqa Jan, Baha'u'llah's
amanuensis, affirms, as reported by Nabil, that by the express order of
Baha'u'llah, hundre