Highlights of Persian Literature

The "Early life of Shaikh Saadi Shirazi" in which I made an effort to highlight the life of Saadi. The cheerfulness and exuberant joy which characterize the poems he wrote before he reached his fortieth year, had bubbled up under the repressions of severe discipline and austerity. Within the area of this magnificent scheme, the boldest ever formulated under the name of religion, he found the liberty which his soul desired. Early discipline had made him a morally sound man, and it is the goodness of Saadi that lends such a warm and endearing charm to his works. The last finish was given to his intellectual training by the travels which he took after the Tartar invasion desolated Persia, in the thirteenth century. India, Arabia, Syria, were in turn visited. His comments generally take the form of practical wisdom or religious suggestion. He gives us the impression that he knows life and the human heart thoroughly. we find in Saadi the science of life, as comprising morality and religion, set forth in a most suggestive and a most attractive form.