.. now the hunter can
fight no more against the nipping cold and blinding sleet. Stiff and
stark, with haggard cheek and shrivelled lip, he lies among the
snow-drifts; till, with tooth and claw, the famished wild-cat
strives in vain to pierce the frigid marble of his limbs."
Meredith tells of a bird, playing with a magic ring, and all the time
trying to sing its song; but the ring falls and has to be picked up
again, and the song is broken. It is a good parable of life, that
impossible compromise between the magic ring and the simple song. Those
who choose the earth-magic of Omar's epicureanism will find that the
song of the spirit is broken, until they cease from the vain attempt at
singing and fall into an earth-bound silence.
Thus Omar Kayyam has brought us a rich treasure from the East, of
splendid diction and much delightful and fascinating sweetness of
poetry. All such gifts are an enrichment to the language and a
decoration to the thought of a people. When, however, they are taken
more seriously, they may certainly bring plague with them, as other
Eastern things have sometimes done.
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