My love does not accept the flower from my hand; I will send her the stars of heaven in a Firga.

Thy image appears to me in my dreams, I awake in the night and cry till the morning.

I told him, There is such a thing as separation, and my friend burst into laughter till he grew green.

When the perfume of thy locks comes to me, it is the morning that comes to me, and I blossom like the rose.

O letter, blessed be thy fate! Thou art going to see my beloved.
My honor and my name, my life and my wealth-I will give every-

thing for the eyes of my beloved.

Strike my head, plunder my goods, but let me see the eyes of the one I love, and I will give my blood.

Red are thy lips, white are thy teeth, so that at thy sight the angels of heaven are confounded.

- Red are my lips, white are my teeth; they are thine. To the others the dust of the earth!

O my soul! at last thou wilt become dust; for I have seen the eyes of my friend, and they were friendly no more.

Were there a narrow passage to the dark niche in the grave, I should go and offer flowers to my love.

O master builder! his grave was too well made; and my friend will stay as long as time lasts.

Of the inner family life popular song is rather reticent. Of the brutality of man, the slavery of woman, the harsh voice, the insult, the strokes, the whipping at the post, the fits of mad jealousy without love, it has nothing to say. Women, however, have also their poetry and their poets, the "duman"; but that poetry goes hardly out of the walls of the harem. I was fortunate enough to gather some fragments of it, though less than I should have liked. A child is a child even to an Afghan mother:

Your two large eyes are like the stars of heaven;
Your white face is like the throne of Shah Jahan:
Your two tender, delicate arms are like blades of Iran:
And your slender body is like the standard of Solomon.
My life for you! Do not cry!

O Lord! give me a son who says, "Papa! papa!"
Let his mother wash him in milk!

Let her rub him with butter!

They will call him to the mosque.
The molla will teach him reading,
And the students will kiss him.

Dear, dear child! a flower in your hat!

It shines like a sprig of gold!

The following is a nursery rhyme which I believe is unparalleled in the whole of the nursery literature; it is history as well as a lullaby.

In the time of the Sikh domination, I am told, a Sikh carried away by force a Yusufzai girl, and took her to Lahore. Her brothers went in search of her, and found at last, after a year, the place where she lived. She had a child by the Sikh. She recognized them from the window, put the child in the cradle, and while her husband was drunk and asleep, she rocked the child with a lullaby in which she informed her brothers of all they had to do. The Sikhs are gone, but the lullaby is still sung:

Swing, swing, zangutai! Come not, ye robbers. Come not by the lower side: come by the upper side, sweet and low. Swing, swing, zangutai! There are two dogs inside; I have tied them with rims.

Swing, swing, zangutai! There is a little basket inside, full with sovereigns.

Swing, swing, zangutai! There is a bear asleep; come quickly therefore.

Swing, swing, zangutai! If he becomes aware of you, there will be

no salvation in your distress.

Swing, swing, zangutai! The infidel is a drunkard, he does not perceive the noise.

Swing, swing, zangutai!

Every life must end with "voceros." During the agony all the family surround the dying, and repeat the sacred formula, "Ashhadu:-I bear witness that Allah is God, and there is no other God. I bear witness that Mohammed is his servant and apostle." Thus the dying soul is kept in the remembrance of God, and brought to repeat the Ashhadu, and dies in confessing God, and is saved. In the moment when his soul goes, an angel comes, and converses, with him, questions him, and recognizing a good Mussulman, says: "Thy faith is perfect." Then the men leave the room; the women sit around the dying bed; the daughter, sister, or wife of the deceased, standing before the dead, repeats the vocero for an hour, and at each time the chorus of

women

answer with a long, piercing lamentation, that thrills

through the hearts of the men in the courtyard, and creates the due sorrow.

Here are some of the voceros; a mere translation cannnot of course render the effect of those simple plaints, which derive most of their power from the accent and the mere physical display of emotion.

For a father:

Alas! alas! my father!

I shall see you no more on the road.

The world has become desolate to you forever.

For a mother:

O my mother! the rose-hued,
You kept me so tenderly,

I shed for you tears of blood.

For a husband:

You were the lord of my life:
Then to me a king was a beggar:
This was the time when I was a queen.

For a daughter:

O my daughter! so much caressed,
Whom I had kept so tenderly,
Now you have deserted me,

This world is the place of sorrow.

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN

(1809-1882)

NLIKE his disciples Spencer and Huxley, Darwin shunned the "Reviews." He wrote "works" and "treatises,"-nothing

which can be called an essay in the popular sense, though such works as "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man » are constructed on a plan which often results incidentally in completely elaborated essays of great merit. Darwin is voluminous, but not diffuse. He deals with facts by massing as illustrations of his hypotheses everything which can be brought to bear from his own extensive observation and his still more extensive reading. It is said that he had a habit of buying books and tearing from them, to be filed for reference, everything in them which bore on his own work. He handles his facts with great literary skill, but the nature of the subjects he treated called for amplification rather than for the condensation which the highest class of the essay demands. In his summary of the theory of Natural Selection and in his restatement of his views of the Survival of the Fittest, he illustrates his habit of thinking coherently and compactly and shows at the same time the essentially poetical quality of his imagination. "As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds," he writes, "and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications."

Though perhaps he never attempted verse in his life, Darwin is indeed much more a poet than his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, author of "The Loves of the Plants," from whom and Lord Monboddo he inherited his theory of "The Descent of Man." "Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament ?» asks the elder Darwin- «from one living filament which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations?" This is in itself doubtlessly a much higher achievement of constructive imagination than anything the elder Darwin ever put into his verse, but in tracing the earthworm through the clay as he prepares the barren earth for man; in following the insect from flower to flower, to find how

the beauty and fragrance of the flower harmonize the instincts of insect life with a great plan of perpetual improvement operating throughout all nature, the younger Darwin showed the same mind which was in Milton and Shakespeare. Though himself an agnostic, he insisted that his theories were compatible with orthodox Christianity, and his celebrated pupil, the learned and saintly Drummond, has demonstrated it to the satisfaction of many who at first believed it impossible. But however much the science of some may conflict with the theology of others, the theory that all the laws of nature work to force progress resulted under Darwin's researches in developing such new ideas of beauty and harmony that there was an irresistible impulse to accept it as true. It was the highest poetical idea ever attained by biological science, and it has already worked itself out in revolutionary improvements of flowers and fruits by methods which Darwin first suggested.

This is the positive part of Darwin's great work. The negative part remains still to be fought over in the twentieth century—as it must necessarily be with bitterness. The Malthusian theory that among men the strong must crush the weak in order to survive has been discredited in political economy, but as Darwin introduced it into science as the basis of his theory of struggle and survival, it comes back into politics from an unexpected quarter, and it has already resulted in bold denial that there can exist as a reality what Beccaria and Burlamaqui asserted as natural, inherent, and inalienable rights.

Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England, February 12th, 1809. Educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, he made up his mind early in life to devote himself to science. In pursuance of his plan, he retired in 1842 to a secluded part of Kent where he carried on the investigation which resulted in his first epoch-marking work, "The Origin of Species," published in 1859. "The Descent of Man," which appeared in 1871, provoked the most heated controversy of the nineteenth century. But Darwin took no part in it. While it was raging, he devoted his time to the study of the minutiæ of nature. His work on Earthworms has been greatly admired by some because of the faculty of close observation it shows. This faculty, illustrated in his researches into the cross-fertilization of plants by means of insects, has proved more immediately valuable than his great powers of generalization. The modern rose-garden and the modern orchard are products of this kind of "Darwinism." These noble results of his ideas remain as his best memorial.

W. V. B.