SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Under this heading we notice such Books qf the week as hays not boss reserred for review in other forms.]
She was born in 1639, and died fifty years later, after a life which was celebrated for its unhappiness and much of which was spent in a fortress, where she was confined by her father.
Among the many stories related of her in Miss Westbrook's introduction to the present volume we may quote one of her tragic love affair with Akil Khan, governor of Lahore. He came to meet her secretly in her garden.
"The Emperor was told and came unexpectedly, and Zeb-un- Nissa, taken unawares, could think of no hiding-place for her lover but a deg, or large cooking vessel. The Emperor asked, What is in the deg ?' and was answered, Only water to be heated.' Put it on the fire, then,' ho ordered; and it was done. Zeb-un-Nissa at that moment thought more of her reputation than of her lover, and came near the deg and whispered, ' Keep silence if you are my true lover, for the sake of my honour:"
The wretched man perished without a sound. This book, issued in the "Wisdom of the East" Belies, contains transla- tions of fifty from among the very numerous poems composed by Zeb-un-Nissa, mainly during her imprisonment. The poems, as Miss Westbrook points out, are, like other Sufic: poetry, devoted to the adoration of God under the form of the "Beautiful Beloved," but they constantly show a catholicity of faith which is noteworthy, as in the following lines, declaring that God is too great to be worshipped either in a mosque or in a Hindu temple
"No Muslim I, But an idolater ; I bow before the image of my Love, And worship her : No Brahman I; My sacred thread
I cast emu, for round my neck I wear licr plaited hair instead."
The English reader will be grateful for these thoroughly adequate renderings of the poems.
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