Harlebeke, a town of Belgium, province of West Flanders, and arrondissement of Courtrai, on the Lys, and on the railway between Courtrai and Ghent, 3 miles N.E. of the former town. It has some woollen manufactures. Pop. (1851) 4677.

Haff, or Stettin Haff, a lagoon in the Prussian province of Pomerania, lying N. of Stettin, and communicating with the Baltic by several mouths. It is about 30 miles in length from E. to W., by about 12 miles in breadth; and is divided into the Great and Little Haff. It receives the Oder, Ihna, Ucker, and Peene rivers.

Hafiz, Shems Eddin Mohammed, one of the most elegant and popular poets of Persia, was born at Shiraz about the beginning of the fourteenth century. Neither the date of his birth nor that of his death is accurately known. He was carefully trained in law and the doctrines of the Koran, but he seems to have devoted the better part of his life to the service of the muses. A pleasant tradition describes how he first donned their livery. There is a place called Pirisch, at a little distance from Shiraz; and it was a popular belief that a youth who should pass forty consecutive nights there without sleep would become an eminent poet. Hafiz made the experiment, and on the morning after the fortieth night an old man in a green mantle (who was no other than Khizr in person) came forward, and, presenting him with a brimming cup of nectar, rewarded his perseverance with an inspiring draught. From this time he devoted himself to poetry, and with such success, that the Sultan of Bagdad hearing of his fame, invited him to his court. The poet, however, does not seem to have accepted the invitation, or, if he did, it was only for a short time. When Shiraz fell into the hands of Tamerlane, the poet was summoned into the presence of the conqueror. In one of his lyrics the poet had said—

"O pride of Shiraz, nymph divine, Accept my heart, and yield me thine; Then were its price all Samarcand, The wealth Bokhara's walls command, That pretty mole of dusky dye Thy cheek displays, I'd gladly buy."

Tamerlane, believing that the poet meant to cast a slight on the chief cities of his empire, reproached him with his promise to exchange Samarcand and Bokhara for the favours of his mistress. "It is that very generosity," said the poet, "that has made me so poor as you now see me." The date of Hafiz's death is variously given. Daulet-Shah places it in 1389. The poet was suspected of having been an unbeliever, and even at heart a Christian; and it was only with considerable difficulty that his friends obtained a decent burial for his body. A splendid monument over his grave is inscribed with a half-enigmatical legend which seems to confirm the testimony of Daulet-Shah as to the date of his death.

Hafiz is the Anacreon of Persia. His poetry, which is wholly lyrical, is devoted to the praises of wine and flowers, and nightingales and female beauties, for all of which Shiraz was famous. From these themes, however, he passes with startling rapidity to the gravest moralizing on the chances and changes of life, and the instability of all human things. The more strict of his co-religionists regard his works as, on the whole, dangerous in their tendency; while those who defend the poet maintain that they are not to be interpreted in a literal, but in an allegorical sense. The probability is that both are right; and that the poet—by turns a devotee and a debauchee—gave to the ode the cast of thought that happened to prevail at the moment when it was written. Sir William Jones, who strongly advocates the allegorical method, confesses that many of the odes can only be interpreted in a literal sense. The sect of the Sufis, with whom Hafiz had identified himself towards the close of his life, refuse to make even this concession; and some of their best commentators have striven elaborately to prove their point. The best of the Turkish critics, Ferydoun and Sondy, have taken the same view.

The works of Hafiz were collected after his death. This collection, called the Dyran, was undertaken by Seid-Kacem-Anvary, himself a distinguished author. According to the best MSS. the Dyran contains 571 odes or ghazels. The edition of Hafiz published at Calcutta in 1791, however, only contains 557 of these ghazels, and seven Kaszydehs, or Elegies. The first European who called attention to the poetry of Hafiz was the celebrated orientalist Hyde, in his Syntagma Dissertationum. But it was not till Rewaski and Sir William Jones almost simultaneously published, the former his Specimen Poeseos Asiatica, &c., at Vienna in 1771, and the latter his Commentarii Poeseos Asiaticae, that the curiosity of the scholars of the West was fairly roused. The whole Dyran has since been translated into German by Von Hammer, Tubingen, 1812. Richardson, the author of the Persian Dictionary, published A Specimen of Persian Poetry, or Odes of Hafiz, with an English translation and paraphrase, chiefly from the Specimen Poeseos Asiaticae of Baron Rewaski; Lond. 1774. Nott has published Select Odes of Hafiz, translated into English verse; Lond. 1787; and Hindley a somewhat similar work in 1800. (Biograph. Univers.; Ersch. and Gruber's Encyclopédie.) Wilken's Chrestomathia Persica, Leipzig, 1805, contains the life of Hafiz by Daulet-Shah; which is also to be found in Silvestre de Sacy's Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits