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Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phanton’s dwell,
A breath, a wind, a soul, a voice, a tinkling of the Camel’s bell.

He appreciates to the full the hedonism of Omar but he casts it aside as emptiness. He tried the religion of pleasure and beauty. His rules of life are many and first is “eternal war with Ignorance.” He says: “Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane. The Atom must fight the unequal fray against a myriad giants. The end is to “learn the noblest lore, to know that all we know is naught.” Self-approval is enough reward. The whole duty of man is to himself, but he must “hold Humanity one man” and, looking back at what he was, determine not to be again that thing. “Abjure the Why and seek the How.” The gods are silent. The indivisible puny Now in the length of infinite time is Man’s all to make the best of. The Law may have a Giver but let be, let be!

Thus I may find a future life, a nobler copy of our own, Where
every riddle shall be ree’d, where every knowledge shall be known;
Where ’twill be man’s to see the whole of what on earth he sees a part;
Where change shall ne’er surcharge the thought; nor hope deferred shall hurt the heart.
But–faded flower and fallen leaf no more shall deck the parent tree;
A man once dropt by Tree of Life, what hope of other life has he?
The shattered bowl shall know repair; the riven lute shall sound once more;
But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to man restore?
The shivered clock again shall strike, the broken reed shall pipe again;
But we, we die and Death is one, the doom of brutes, the doom of men.
Then, if Nirvana round our life with nothingness, ’tis haply blest;
Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length have won their guerdon–Rest.
Cease, Abou, cease! My song is sung, nor think the gain the singer’s prize
Till men hold Ignorance deadly sin till Man deserves his title, “Wise.”
In days to come, Days slow to dawn, when Wisdom deigns to dwell with men,
These echoes of a voice long stilled haply shall wake responsive strain:
Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to tell–
The whispers of the Desert wind: the tinkling of the Camel’s bell.

So ends the song. The notes appended thereto by Burton are a demonstration of his learning and his polemic power. The poem is his life of quest, of struggle, of disappointment coined into song more or less savage. It seems to me that he overlooked one thing near to him that would have lighted the darkness of his view, while looking To Reason for balm for the wounds of existence. He ignored his wife’s love which, silly and absurd as it seems at times, in the records she has left us, is a sweeter poem than this potent plaint and protest he has left us. He explored all lands but the one in which he lived unconsciously–the Land of Tenderness. This is the pity of his life and it is also its indignity. He was crueler than “the Cruelty of Things.” He “threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe”–a woman’s heart. But–how we argue in a circle!–that he, with his fine vision could not see this, is perhaps, a justification of his poem’s bitterness. Even her service went for naught, seeing it brought no return of love from its object.

Burton was a great man, though a failure. His wife’s life was one continuous act of love for him that he ignores and her life was a failure, too, since she never succeeded in making the world worship him as she did. Still “the failures of some the infinities beyond the successes of others” and all success is failure in the end. Still again, it is better to have loved in vain than never to have loved at all, and fine and bold and brave as was Richard Francis Burton, his wife, with her “strong power called weakness,” was the greater of the two. She wrote no “Kasidah” of complaint, but suffered and was strong. St. Louis, August 16th, 1897.