Muntakhab al-tawarikh 211: III. Kh’aja Husain of Marv.

211

He was one of the sons of that saint of the Lord and traveller in the path of the Eternal God, Shaikh Ruknu-d-din ‘Ala’u-d-daulah of Samnan (may God sanctify his tomb !). In those branches of knowledge which exercise the reasoning faculty, he was the pupil of Maulana ‘Isamu-d-din and Mulla Hanafi, and in the study of the holy law he was the disciple of the last and best of the sages and traditionists Shaikhu-bnu-Hajar-i-Sani (may God have mercy on him!) His facility in verse, his elegance in literary style, his rhetorical flourishes, his fine delivery, his polish and copiousness of diction and his wit were unrivalled. He composed a diwan, and his poetry, though not in the first rank, is of respectable quality. The following couplets are by him:—
“O, thou in whose absence the tears drop from my eyelashes, While the thought of sleep is banished from my eyes! Thou didst display thyself to me in such wise as thou wert not, Alas! that thou wert not such as thou didst seem.”
It seems likely that this couplet is an imitation of the following quatrain:—
“We say that may be we are of the faithful—but we are not, And that we are of the truthful and sincere,—but we are not. We are adorned outwardly, but inwardly we are otherwise. Alas! that we are not what we seem to be!”
The following couplets are also by Harvi:—
“With me thy brow is wrinkled like the rosebud, With others thy lips open in smiles, like the pistachio.”
“I wish that the love which I bear to thee Should be known to me, and to thee, and to God!”
The following couplets in praise of Muhammad are from the translation of the Singhāsan Battīsī, of which His Majesty ordered this poet to make a translation, which was never completed:— “The sweet-voiced nightingale of the garden of revelation Whose eyes were anointed with the antimony of us base crows, Who in his unquestionable abrogation of the Psalms of David, Has drawn his pen through the copies of the Pentateuch and the Gospels, To his high court is prophecy entrusted, To him, the chief of the prophets and the seal of apostleship.”