hereof are the tongues
of poets."--MAHOMET.

The Arabian calendar has always been in a distinctive manner subject to
the religion of the people. Before Mahomet imposed his faith upon Mecca,
there were four sacred months following each other, in which no war might
be waged. For four months, therefore, the tumultuous Arab spirit was
restrained from that most precious to it; pilgrimages to holy places were
undertaken, and there was a little leisure for the cultivation of art and
learning.

The Greater Pilgrimage to Mecca, comprising the sevenfold circuit of the
Kaaba and the kissing of the sacred Black Stone, and culminating in a
procession to the holy places of Mina and Arafat, could only be
undertaken in Dzul-Higg, corresponding in the time of Mahomet to our
March. The month preceding, Dzul-Cada, was occupied in a kind of
preparation and rejoicing, which took the form of a fair at Ocatz, three
days' journey east of Mecca, when representatives of all the surrounding
nations used to assemble to exchange merchandise, to take part in the
games, to listen to the contests in poetry and rhetoric, and sometimes to
be roused into sinister excitement at the proximity of so many tribes
differing from them in nationality, and often in their religion and moral
code.

Into this vast concourse came Mahomet, a lad of fifteen, eager to see,
hear, and know. He was present at the poetic contests, and caught from
the protagonists a reflection of their vivid, fitful eloquence, with its
ceaseless undercurrent of monotony.

Romance, in so far as it represents the love of the strange, is a product
of the West. There is a rigidity in the Eastern mind that does not allow
of much change or seeking after new things. Wild and beautiful as this
poetry of Arabia is, its themes and their manner of treatment seldom
vary; as the desert is changeless in contour, filled with a brilliant
sameness, whirling at times into sombre fury and as suddenly subsiding,
so is the literature which it fostered. The monotony is expressed in a
reiteration of subject, barbarous to the intellect of the West; endurance
is born of that monotony, and strength, and the acquiescence in things as
they are, but not the discovery and development of ideas. Arabia does not
flash forth a new presentment of beauty, following the vivid apprehension
of some lovely form, but broods over it in a kind of slumbering
enthusiasm that mounts at last into a glory of metaphor, drowning the
su