ture, the softening influence of luxury
and unwonted riches, are so faithfully portrayed in the literature of
the Arabs as to give us a picture of the spiritual life of the people
which no mere massing of facts can ever give. Well aware of this
themselves, the Arabs at an early date commenced the collection and
preservation of their old literary monuments with a care and a studious
concern which must excite within us a feeling of wonder. For the
material side of life must have made a strong appeal to these people
when they came forth from their desert homes. Pride in their own doings,
pride in their own past, must have spurred them on; yet an ardent
feeling for the beautiful in speech is evident from the beginning of
their history. The first knowledge that we have of the tribes scattered
up and down the deserts and oases of the Arabian peninsula comes to us
in the verses of their poets. The early Teuton bards, the rhapsodists of
Greece, were not listened to with more rapt attention than was the
simple Bedouin, who, seated on his mat or at the door of his tent, gave
vent to his feelings of joy or sorrow in such manner as nature had
gifted him. As are the ballads for Scottish history, so are the verses
of these untutored bards the record of the life in which they played no
mean part. Nor could the splendors of court life at Damascus, Bagdad, or
Cordova make their rulers insensible to the charms of poetry,--that
"beautiful poetry with which Allah has adorned the Muslim." A verse
happily said could always charm, a satire well pointed could always
incite; and the true Arab of to-day will listen to those so adorned with
the same rapt attention as did his fathers of long ago.

This gift of the desert--otherwise so sparing of its favors--has not
failed to leave its impression upon the whole Arabic literature. Though
it has produced some prose writers of value, writing, as an art to charm
and to please, has always sought the measured cadence of poetry or the
unmeasured symmetry of rhymed prose. Its first lispings are in the
"trembling" (rajaz) metre,--iambics, rhyming in the same syllable
throughout; impromptu verses, in which the poet expressed the feelings
of the moment: a measure which, the Arabs say, matches the trembling
trot of the she-camel. It is simple in its character; coming so near to
rhymed prose that Khalil (born 718), the great grammarian, would not
willingly admit that such lines could really be called poetry. Som