Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 4.djvu/220

190 So thick and fast, they were as chains, and I to her did say, “My tears have fallen so thick, that now they’ve bound me with a chain.” The treasures of my patience fail, absence is long on me And yearning sore; and passion’s stress consumeth me amain. If God’s protection cover me and Fortune be but just And Fate with her whom I adore unite me once again, I’ll doff my clothes, that she may see how worn my body is, For languishment and severance and solitary pain.

Then he went on to the fourth cage, where he found a nightingale, which, at sight of him, began to tune its plaintive note. When he heard its descant, he burst into tears and repeated the following verses:

Then he went on a little and came to a handsome cage, than which there was no goodlier there, and in it a culver, that is to say, a wood-pigeon, the bird renowned among the birds as the singer of love-longing, with a collar of jewels about its neck, wonder-goodly of ordinance. He considered it awhile and seeing it mazed and brooding in its cage, shed tears and repeated these verses: