Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/411

377, or ? For sustained romantic exultation, it would be hard to surpass or the legend of, and few languages can produce such masterpieces of melancholy beauty as or, strains that linger in the thought like the tones of that “alte, ernste Weise” which haunts the hearing of the dying Tristan in the greatest of musical dramas. Nor is the power of effective poetical portraiture lacking, when required, teste the vivid picture of the Khalif’s pleasure garden at Baghdad and the exquisitely imaginative description of the lute in Ali Noureddin and the Frank King’s Daughter; and when the movement of the story calls for the exercise of an austerer faculty, as in the battle-scenes of or, the text quickens into a stern and nervous energy, a vivid and unfaltering concision, that could hardly be excelled by Homer or Dante. Equally remarkable is the wealth of humour and wit that characterizes the work, whether (as in ) it bring to mind the headlong horseplay of Rabelais or (as in the episode of the Stoker, of the Hashish-Eater in Ali Shar, or of ) the rough but effective burlesque of John Heywood and the mediæval farce-writers, whether (as in the anecdotes of ) it recall the cynical humour