seem to sympathise with the gaps in the terrace walls: the cyclamen leaves in the one are salaaming the cyclamen flowers in the other. O, these terraces would have delighted the heart of the American naturalist Thoreau. He could not have desired stone walls with more gaps in them.
But mind you, these are not dark, ugly, hollow, hopeless chinks. Behind every one of them lurks a mystery. Far back in the niches I can see the busts of the poets who wrote the poems which these beautiful wild flowers are reading to me. Yes, the authors are dead, and what I behold now are the flowers of their amours. These are the offspring of their embraces, the crystallised dew of their love. Yes, this one single, simple act of love brings forth an infinite variety of flowers to celebrate the death of the finite outward shape and the eternal essence of life perennial.
In complete surrender lies the divineness of things eternal. This is the keynote of the Oriental mystic poets. And I incline to the belief that they of all bards have sung best the song of love. In rambling through the fields with these beautiful children of the terraces, I know not what draws me to al-Farid, the one erotic-mystic poet of Arabia, whose interminable rhymes have a perennial charm. Perhaps such lines as these—
‘All that is fair is fairer when she rises, All that is sweet is sweeter when she is here; And every form of beauty she surprises With one brief word she whispers in its ear:
‘Thy wondrous charms, O let them not deceive thee; They are but borrowed from her for a while; Thine outward guise and loveliness would grieve thee, If in thine inmost soul she did not smile.
‘All colours, forms, into each other merging, Are woven on her Loom of Unity; For she alone is One in All diverging, And she alone is absolute and free.’