[P.99]I Cannot Well Explain The Effect Of Arab Poetry To One Who Has Not Visited The Desert.[FN#

34] Apart from the pomp of words, and the music of the sound,[FN#35] there is a dreaminess of

Idea and a haze thrown over the object, infinitely attractive, but indescribable. Description,

[p.100] indeed, would rob the song of indistinctness, its essence. To borrow a simile from a sister art; the Arab poet sets before the mental eye, the dim grand outlines of picture,—which must be filled up by the reader, guided only by a few glorious touches, powerfully standing out, and by the sentiment which the scene is intended to express;—whereas, we Europeans and moderns, by stippling and minute touches, produce a miniature on a large scale so objective as to exhaust rather than to arouse reflection. As the poet is a creator, the Arab’s is poetry, the European’s versical description. [FN#36] The language, “like a faithful wife, following the mind and giving birth to its offspring,” and free from that “luggage of particles” which clogs our modern tongues, leaves a mysterious vagueness between the relation of word to word, which materially assists the sentiment, not the sense, of the poem. When verbs and nouns have, each one, many different significations, only the radical or general idea suggests itself.[FN#37] Rich and varied synonyms, illustrating the finest shades of meaning, are artfully used; now scattered to startle us by distinctness, now to form as it were a star about which dimly seen satellites revolve.

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