Epigram, is not to his credit. That honor belongs to Abu Said of
Khorasan (968-1049), who used it as a means of expressing his mystic
pantheism. But there is an Omar Khayyám club in London--not one bearing
the name of Abu Said. What is the bond which binds the Rubáiyát-maker in
far-off Persia to the literati of modern Anglo-Saxondom?

By his own people Omar was persecuted for his want of orthodoxy; and yet
his grave to this day is held in much honor. By others he was looked
upon as a Mystic. Reading the five hundred or so authentic quatrains one
asks, Which is the real Omar? Is it he who sings of wine and of
pleasure, who seems to preach a life of sensual enjoyment? or is it the
stern preacher, who criticises all, high and low; priest, dervish, and
Mystic--yea, even God himself? I venture to say that the real Omar is
both; or, rather, he is something higher than is adequately expressed in
these two words. The Ecclesiastes of Persia, he was weighed down by the
great questions of life and death and morality, as was he whom people so
wrongly call "the great sceptic of the Bible." The "_Weltschmerz_" was
his, and he fought hard within himself to find that mean way which
philosophers delight in pointing out. If at times Omar does preach
_carpe diem_, if he paint in his exuberant fancy the delights of
carousing, Fitzgerald is right--he bragged more than he drank. The
under-current of a serious view of life runs through all he has written;
the love of the beautiful in nature--a sense of the real worth of
certain things and the worthlessness of the Ego. Resignation to what is
man's evident fate; doing well what every day brings to be done--this is
his own answer. It was Job's--it was that of Ecclesiastes.

This same "_Weltschmerz_" is ours to-day; therefore Omar Khayyám is of
us beloved. He speaks what often we do not dare to speak; one of his
quatrains can be more easily quoted than some of those thoughts can be