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.  Some of these verses go back to the fourth and fifth centuries of our era.  But a growing sense of the poet’s art was incompatible with so simple a measure; and a hundred years before the appearance of the Prophet, many of the canonical sixteen metres were already in vogue.  Even the later complete poems bear the stamp of their origin, in the loose connection with which the different parts stand to each other.  The “Kasidah” (poem) is built upon the principle that each verse must be complete in itself,—­there being no stanzas,—­and separable from the context; which has made interpolations and omissions in the older poems a matter of ease.

The classical period of Arabic poetry, which reaches from the beginning of the sixth century to the beginning of the eighth, is dominated by this form of the Kasidah.  Tradition refers its origin to one al-Muhalhel ibn Rabi’a of the tribe of Taghlib, about one hundred and fifty years before Muhammad; though, as is usual, this honor is not uncontested.  The Kasidah is composed of distichs, the first two of which only are to rhyme; though every line must end in the same syllable.