From the Beginning was written what shall be
Unhaltingly the Pen writes, and is heedless of good and bad;
On the First Day He appointed everything that must be,
Our grief and our efforts are vain,

develops into:--

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

The general tendency to amplification is shown again in the translation
of the two lines:--

Forsake not the book, the lover's lips and the green bank of the field,
Ere that the earth enfold thee in its bosom.

into the oft-quoted verses:--

With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where the name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Mahmud on his Throne.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow!

And in the lines of Omar:--

In a thousand places on the road I walk, thou placest snares.
Thou sayest: "I will catch thee if thou steppeth into them,"
In no smallest thing is the world independent of thee,
_Thou_ orderest all things--and callest _me_ rebellious!

majestically shaping into FitzGerald's rendering:--

Oh, Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd, Man's Forgiveness give--and take!

To what school did FitzGerald belong? Who were his literary progenitors?
Lucretius, Horace and Donne, at any rate, had a considerable share in
moulding his thought and fashioning the form of his verse. The unrhymed
line, so often but by no means uniformly resounding with a suspended
clangour that is not caught up by the following stanza is distinctly
reminiscent of the Alcaics of Horace.

Epicurean, in the ordinary sense of the term, he certainly is, but it is
of the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "_carpe
diem_" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commended
itself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, side by side with
complete agnosticism, t