The Princess, who had once in her life seen a poet from behind the screens of gauze in her Father's hall, and had conceived from that specimen no very favourable ideas of the Caste, expected but little in this new exhibition to interest her; she felt inclined, however, to alter her opinion on the very first appearance of FERAMORZ. He was a youth about LALLA ROOKн's own age, and graceful as that idol of women, Crishna, 22—such as he appears to their young imaginations, heroic, beautiful, breathing music from his very eyes, and exalting the religion of his worshippers into love. His dress was simple, yet not without some marks of costliness; and the ladies of the Princess were not long in discovering that the cloth which encircled his high Tartarian cap was of the most delicate kind that the shawl-goats of Tibet supply. 23 Here and there, too, over his vest, which was confined by a flowered girdle of Kashan, hung strings of fine pearl, disposed with an air of studied negligence :-nor did the exquisite embroidery of his sandals escape the observation of these fair critics; who, however they might give way to FADLADEEN upon the unimportant topics of religion and government, had the spirit of martyrs in everything relating to such momentous matters as jewels and embroidery.

For the purpose of relieving the pauses of recitation by music, the young Cashmerian held in his hand a kitar;such as, in old times, the Arab maids of the West used to listen to by moonlight in the gardens of the Alhambraand having premised, with much humility, that the story he was about to relate was founded on the adventures of that Veiled Prophet of Khorassan 24 who, in the year of the Hegira 163, created such alarm throughout the Eastern Empire, made an obeisance to the Princess, and thus began:

IN that delightful Province of the Sun,
The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
Where all the loveliest children of his beam,
Flow'rets and fruits, blush over every stream,2

C

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And, fairest of all streams, the MURGA roves
Among MEROU's 27 bright palaces and groves ;-
There on that throne, to which the blind belief
Of millions rais'd him, sat the Prophet-Chief,
The Great MOKANNA. O'er his features hung
The Veil, the Silver Veil, which he had flung
In mercy there, to hide from mortal sight

His dazzling brow, till man could bear its light.

For, far less luminous, his votaries said,

Were ev'n the gleams, miraculously shed

O'er MOUSSA's 28 cheek,29 when down the Mount he trod,

All glowing from the presence of his God!

On either side, with ready hearts and hands,
His chosen guard of bold Believers stands ;
Young fire-eyed disputants, who deem their swords,
On points of faith, more eloquent than words;
And such their zeal, there's not a youth with brand
Uplifted there, but, at the Chief's command,
Would make his own devoted heart its sheath,
And bless the lips that doom'd so dear a death!

In hatred to the Caliph's hue of night,30
Their vesture, helms and all, is snowy white;
Their weapons various-some equipp'd for speed,
With javelins of the light Kathaian reed; 31

Or bows of buffalo horn and shining quivers

Fill'd with the stems 32 that bloom on IRAN's rivers ; 33 While some, for war's more terrible attacks,

Wield the huge mace and ponderous battle-axe;

And as they wave aloft in morning's beam

The milk-white plumage of their helms, they seem