and finds throughout the poems the higher assurance that
The East and West are one in Allah’s grace:
Which way so’er ye turn, behold—His face!
It is difficult to choose from the several volumes portraying Oriental life, such poems as shall best represent it, since in any direction we shall find a picture full of color and of strange new charm: the white mosques and minarets; the gardens of citron and pomegranate; the bazaars, with their rare fabrics and curios; the pilgrims, dozing in the shade of the temples; the Bedouins, riding in from the desert; the women carrying from the springs their water-jars. We shall hear the sunrise cry of the muezzin from the minarets; the zither and lute in the gardens at evening; the jargon of tongues in booth and market-place; the philosopher expounding the Koran; the lover singing the songs of Araby. The dramatic
life of that impulsive, passionate people will be seen in such poems as the “Dancing of Suleima,” “At the Tomb of Abel,” and “Yousef and Melhem,” and the philosophical side in many a poem translating the precepts of the Koran into action; but it is, after all, for the picture in which all this is set that one comes with chief pleasure to these songs. Not only the human element of that strangely fascinating life is incorporated in them, but all the phenomena of nature in its swift-changing moods pass in review before one’s eyes, particularly of the swift transitions of the desert sun, stayed by no detaining cloud, and followed by the immediate gloom of night. The graphic lines—
When on the desert’s rim,
In sudden, awful splendor, stood the sun—
are excelled in terse, pictorial force by the record of its setting,—
Then sudden dipped the sun.—
Nor easily forgotten are those pictures of lying in the open when the cooling dark had fallen upon the yearning land, or upon the hills when