No More Learning

(LVI. ) A Jest, of course, at his Studies. A curious mathematical
Quatrain of Omar's has been pointed out to me; the more curious
because almost exactly parallel'd by some Verses of Doctor Donne's,
that are quoted in Izaak Walton's Lives! Here is Omar: "You and I are
the image of a pair of compasses; though we have two heads (sc. our
feet) we have one body; when we have fixed the centre for our circle,
we bring our heads (sc. feet) together at the end. " Dr. Donne:

If we be two, we two are so
As stiff twin-compasses are two;
Thy Soul, the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but does if the other do.

And though thine in the centre sit,
Yet when my other far does roam,
Thine leans and hearkens after it,
And rows erect as mine comes home.

Such thou must be to me, who must
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And me to end where I begun.

(LIX. ) The Seventy-two Religions supposed to divide the World,
including Islamism, as some think: but others not.

(LX. ) Alluding to Sultan Mahmud's Conquest of India and its dark
people.

(LXVIII.
) Fanusi khiyal, a Magic-lanthorn still used in India; the
cylindrical Interior being painted with various Figures, and so
lightly poised and ventilated as to revolve round the lighted Candle
within.

(LXX. ) A very mysterious Line in the Original:

O danad O danad O danad O--

breaking off something like our Wood-pigeon's Note, which she is said
to take up just where she left off.

(LXXV. ) Parwin and Mushtari--The Pleiads and Jupiter.

(LXXXVII. ) This Relation of Pot and Potter to Man and his Maker
figures far and wide in the Literature of the World, from the time of
the Hebrew Prophets to the present; when it may finally take the name
of "Pot theism," by which Mr. Carlyle ridiculed Sterling's
"Pantheism. " My Sheikh, whose knowledge flows in from all quarters,
writes to me--

"Apropos of old Omar's Pots, did I ever tell you the sentence I found
in 'Bishop Pearson on the Creed'? 'Thus are we wholly at the disposal
of His will, and our present and future condition framed and ordered
by His free, but wise and just, decrees. Hath not the potter power
over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and
another unto dishonour? (Rom. ix. 21. ) And can that earth-artificer
have a freer power over his brother potsherd (both being made of the
same metal), than God hath over him, who, by the strange fecundity of
His omnipotent power, first made the clay out of nothing, and then him
out of that? '"

And again--from a very different quarter--"I had to refer the other
day to Aristophanes, and came by chance on a curious Speaking-pot
story in the Vespae, which I had quite forgotten.