Page:Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - Fitzgerald's translation.djvu/44



Of information regarding the actual life of Omar Khayyám, the astronomer poet of Persia, we have practically none. He was born, it is said, about 1018, and died in 1123, at the age of one hundred and five.

The first English version of his quatrains, from which this is reprinted, was written by Fitzgerald, and published in 1859, and, nine years later, reissued to a still unappreciative public, with the stanzas increased to one