Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/130

120 picture of Jehangeer and Nourmahal is the very reverse of what truthful history, corroborated by the personal observation of Sir Thomas Roe, tells us of that cruel sot and his talented but unprincipled Empress. And she could cherish but little true love for the man that had her noble husband, Sheer Afghan, so basely assassinated in order to gain possession of her person.

It is a pity that poetry should be so often perverted and its elegancies made to adorn the unworthy and the vile. Nevertheless, we know that “the judgments of God are according to truth,” and we see here that no wealth, or power, or magnificence, or human adulation, can shield the guilty when the inevitable hand of the Divine verdict has come.

“Elysium” is too European, too Northern, a term to express Shah Jehan's word. But Moore, for a good part of his life a Romanist, may have thought the term over-biblical for his use, and chose the heathen phrase “elysium” in preference to the plain rendering of the word. The inscription runs exactly as follows, expressed in English letters:

And the rendering is:

(The original Persian may be found quoted by Dr. Clarke in his Commentary on Nehemiah i, verse 8.)

In or near Persia was the region of Paradise, and the fame of the first garden, planted by God, near the banks of the Euphrates, lingered as a tradition in its own vicinity for four thousand years, and led to those imitations of it in the “paradises of Oriental despots.” Most of the invasions of India were from the regions of the ancient Eden, and the invaders carried with them their ideas of paradise to the land of the Ganges, and tried to reproduce them there. This Dewan Khass was the central object of the most costly one ever planted in India, or perhaps anywhere else.