And place me on a bed, and mourn for me,
Thou, and the snow-hair'd Zal, and all thy friends.
And thou must lay me in that lovely earth,
And heap a stately mound above my bones,25
And plant a far-seen pillar over all.

That so the passing horseman on the waste
May see my tomb a great way off, and cry:
'Sohrab, the mighty Rustum's son, lies there,
Whom his great father did in ignorance kill!'
And I be not forgotten in my grave."

And, with a mournful voice, Rustum replied:"Fear not! as thou hast said, Sohrab, my son, So shall it be; for I will burn my tents,

And quit the host, and bear thee hence with me,
And carry thee away to Seistan,

And place thee on a bed, and mourn for thee,
With the snow-headed Zal, and all my friends.
And I will lay thee in that lovely earth,
And heap a stately mound above thy bones,
And plant a far-seen pillar over all,

And men shall not forget thee in thy grave.
And I will spare thy host; yea, let them go!
Let them all cross the Oxus back in peace!
What should I do with slaying any more?
For would that all that I have ever slain
Might be once more alive; my bitterest foes,
And they who were call'd champions in their time,
And through whose death I won that fame I have-
And I were nothing but a common man,
A poor, mean soldier, and without renown,
So thou mightest live too, my son, my son!
Or rather would that I, even I myself,

25. The Persian tradition is that over the spot where Sohrab was buried a huge mound, shaped like the hoof of a horse, was erected.

Might now be lying on this bloody sand,

Near death, and by an ignorant stroke of thine,
Not thou of mine! and I might die, not thou;
And I, not thou, be borne to Seistan;

And Zal might weep above my grave, not thine;
And say: 'O son, I weep thee not too sore,
For willingly, I know, thou met'st thine end!'
But now in blood and battles was my youth,
And full of blood and battles is my age,
And I shall never end this life of blood."

Then, at the point of death, Sohrab replied:-
"A life of blood indeed, thou dreadful man!
But thou shalt yet have peace; only not now,
Not yet! but thou shalt have it on that day26
When thou shalt sail in a high-masted ship,
Thou and the other peers of a Kai Khosroo,
Returning home over the salt blue sea,

From laying thy dear master in his grave.”

And Rustum gazed in Sohrab's face, and said:"Soon be that day, my son, and deep that sea! Till then, if fate so wills, let me endure."

He spoke; and Sohrab smiled on him, and took
The spear, and drew it from his side, and eased
His wound's imperious anguish; but the blood
Came welling from the open gash, and life
Flow'd with the stream;-all down his cold white
side

The crimson torrent ran, dim now and soil'd,
Like the soil'd tissue of white violets

Left, freshly gather'd, on their native bank,

26. It is said that shortly after the death of Sohrab the king himself died while on a visit to a famous spring far in the north, and as the nobles were returning with his corpse all were lost in a great tempest. Unfortunately for Sohrab's prophecy, Persian traditions do not include Rustum among the lost.

By children whom their nurses call with haste
Indoors from the sun's eye; his head droop'd low,
His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay—
White, with eyes closed; only when heavy gasps,
Deep heavy gasps quivering through all his frame,
Convulsed him back to life, he open'd them,
And fix'd them feebly on his father's face;

Till now all strength was ebb'd, and from his limbs
Unwillingly the spirit fled away,

Regretting the warm mansion which it left,

And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world.
So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead;
And the great Rustum drew his horseman's cloak
Down o'er his face, and sate by his dead son.
As those black granite pillars, once high-rear'd
By Jemshid in Persepolis, to bear

His house, now 'mid their broken flights of steps
Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side
So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.

And night came down over the solemn waste, And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair, And darken'd all; and a cold fog, with night, Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose, As of a great assembly loosed, and fires Began to twinkle through the fog; for now Both armies moved to camp, and took their meal; The Persians took it on the open sands Southward, the Tartars by the river marge; And Rustum and his son were left alone.

But the majestic river floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste,

Under the solitary moon;-he flow'd
Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè,

Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin

RUSTUM SORROWS OVER SOHRAB

To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcel'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles-
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had

In his high mountain cradle in Pamere,

A foil'd circuitous wanderer-till at last

The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright

And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.27

Matthew Arnold was one of England's purest and greatest men. As scholar, teacher, poet and critic he labored zealously for the betterment of his race and sought to bring them back to a clearer, lovelier spiritual life and to win them from the base and sordid schemes that make only for material success.

He was born in 1822 and was the son of Doctor Thomas Arnold, the great teacher who was so long headmaster of the famous Rugby school, and whose scholarly and Christian influence is so faithfully brought out in Hughes's ever popular story Tom Brown's School Days.

Matthew Arnold received his preparatory education in his father's school at Rugby, and his college training at Oxford. He was always a student and always active in educational work, as an inspector of schools, and for ten years as professor of poetry at Oxford. He twice visited the United States and both times lectured here. His criticisms of America and Americans were severe, for he saw predominant the spirit of money-getting, the thirst for material prosperity and the absence of spiritual interests. In 1888, while at the house of a friend in Liverpool, he died suddenly and peacefully from an attack of heart disease.

Arnold was one of the most exacting and critical of Eng27. This beautiful stanza makes a peculiarly artistic termination to the poem. After the storm and stress of the combat and the heart-breaking pathos of Sohrab's death, the reader willingly rests his thought on the majestic Oxus that still flows on, unchangeable, but ever changing. The suggestion is that after all nature is triumphant, that our pains and losses, our most grievous disappointments and greatest griefs are but incidents in the great drama of life, and that, though like the river Oxus, we for a time become "foiled, circuitous wanderers," we at last see before us the luminous home, bright and tranquil under the shining stars.