Part One Saint and Sceptic Chapter 6 Nourhalma and the Original Esdras

Later on in the afternoon of the same day, when the sun, poised above the western mountain-range, appeared to be lazily looking about him with a drowsy, golden smile of farewell before descending to his rest, Alwyn was once more alone in the library. Twilight shadows were already gathering in the corners of the long, low room, but he had moved the writing-table to the window, in order to enjoy the magnificence of the surrounding scenery, and sat where the light fell full upon his face as he leaned back in his chair, with his hands clasped behind his head, in an attitude of pleased, half-meditative indolence.

He had just finished reading from beginning to end the poem he had composed in his trance ... there was not a line in it he could have wished altered,--not a word that would have been better omitted,--the only thing it lacked was a title, and this was the question on which he now pondered. The subject of the poem itself was not new to him--it was a story he had known from boyhood, ... an old Eastern love-legend, fantastically beautiful as many such legends are, full of grace and passionate fervor--a theme fitted for the nightingale-utterance of a singer like the Persian Hafiz--though even Hafiz would have found it difficult to match the exquisitely choice language and delicately ringing rhythm in which this quaint idyll of long past ages was now most perfectly set like a jewel in fine gold.