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"But in the end, all your stern orderliness, Benham," said Prothero, "only leads to me. The human spirit rebels against this everlasting armour on the soul. After Han came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po? There's scraps of him in English in that little book you have what is it? the LUTE OF JADE? He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam after the Prophet. Life must relax at last...."
It was curious talk for a death-bed; but, when you come to think about it, it's reasonable enough. When a man's got hell in his heart, what good is it goin' to do him to git into heaven?" "What, indeed?" I echoed, thinking how delightful it was that Aunt Jane and Omar Khayyam should be of one mind on this subject.
It expresses itself in many ways, in the reading of Omar Khayyam 'The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes' for example, in the indifference so often shown by men if they lose through their own fault some 'cushy job' and have to go back to the line, or in the doing of really foolish things, foolish because dangerous, but useless.
Some more pictures had just arrived from the framers and were leaning with their faces to the wall, but she did not bother to turn them round. On the table were dirty teacups, a flat chocolate cake, and Omar Khayyam, with an Oswego biscuit between his pages. Also a vase filled with the crimson leaves of autumn. This made her smile.
DEAR FRIEND, . . . I am glad to have your opinion of Emerson's and Whittier's verse Collections, and especially your good opinion of Cranch's translation, `or I am much interested in him. . . . My own reading runs very much in another direction, among those who "reason of" the highest things. Especially I have been interested in what those old atheists, Lucretius and Omar Khayyam, say.
In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the Omnipotent.
Confucius, Longfellow, Plato, the FitzGeraldian Oman Khayyam, Aristotle, Pope, Das Kabir and the Pulambal are drawn upon; the world is placed under tribute from Pekin to the Salt Lake City. A more careless "borrower" to use Emerson's expression, never lifted poetry.
This surprised me so much that I turned round to see if Thornton really looked like a lunatic, but I got no satisfaction from him, for I had once seen a man who might have been his brother, and then I had been playing cricket against an asylum. He was lying back in his chair gazing at the ceiling, and I pulled Omar Khayyam out of the case and put it on the table for Jack to see.
This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts.
How many books on the East David had read he would hardly have been able to say; but something of the East had entered into him, something of the philosophy of Mahomet and Buddha, and the beauty of Omar Khayyam had given a touch of colour and intellect to the narrow faith in which he had been schooled.
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