their little bit of apportioned work in the universe, and have done it
well. India and Arabia have had their great poets and their great
heroes, yet they have remained well-nigh unknown to the men and women of
our latter day, even to those whose world is that of letters. But the
names of Firdusi, Sa'di, Omar Khayyám, Jami, and Háfiz, have a place in
our own temples of fame. They have won their way into the book-stalls
and stand upon our shelves, side by side with the other books which
mould our life and shape our character.

Some reason there must be for the special favor which we show to these
products of Persian genius, and for the hold which they have upon us. We
need not go far to find it. The under-current forces, which determine
our own civilization of to-day, are in a general way the same forces
which were at play during the heyday of Persian literary production. We
owe to the Hellenic spirit, which at various times has found its way
into our midst, our love for the beautiful in art and in literature. We
owe to the Semitic, which has been inbreathed into us by religious forms
and beliefs, the tone of our better life, the moral level to which we
aspire. The same two forces were at work in Persia. Even while that
country was purely Iránian, it was always open to Semitic influences.
The welding together of the two civilizations is the true signature of
Persian history. The likeness which is so evident between the religion
of the Avesta, the sacred book of the pre-Mohammedan Persians, and the
religion of the Old and New Testaments, makes it in a sense easy for us
to understand these followers of Zoroaster. Persian poetry, with its
love of life and this-worldliness, with its wealth of imagery and its
appeal to that which is human in all men, is much more readily
comprehended by us than is the poetry of all the rest of the Orient.
And, therefore, Goethe, Platen, Rückert, von Schack, Fitzgerald, and
Arnold have been able to re-sing their masterpieces so as to delight and