Al-Khalil used to remark that a man's reason and intelligence reached perfection when he attained the age of forty, the age of the Prophet when God sent him forth on his mission; but that they undergo alteration and diminution when the man reaches sixty, the age in which God took the Prophet's soul to himself. He said, again, that the intelligence is clearest at the dawn of day. VI.--A GROUP OF POETS No matter what the profession or calling of these Persians--whether they were lawyers or lawgivers, grammarians or warriors--they all, or almost all, adored verbal felicity and tried their hands at verse. Poetry may be called the gold dust on their lives. Ibn Nubata the poet knew how to say thank you. Saif Ad-Dawlat Ibn Hamdan having given him a horse, this is how he acknowledged it: _O prince! thou whose generous qualities are the offspring of thy natural disposition, and whose pleasing aspect is the emblem of thy mind, I have received the present which thou sentest me, a noble steed whose portly neck seems to unite the heavens to the earth on which he treads. Hast thou then conferred a government upon me, since thou sendest me a spear to which a flowing mane serves as a banner? We take possession of what thou hast conferred and find it to be a horse whose forehead and legs are marked with white, and whose body is so black that a single hair extracted from that colour would suffice to form night's darkest shades. It would seem that the morning had struck him on the forehead and thus made it white, for which reason he took his revenge by wading into the entrails of the morning, and thus whitening his legs. He paces slowly, yet one of his names is Lightning; he wears a veil, having his face covered with white, as if to conceal it, and yet beauty itself would be his only rival. Had the sun and the moon a portion only of his ardour, it would be impossible to withstand their heat. The eye cannot follow his movements, unless you rein him in and restrain his impetuosity. The glances of the eye cannot seize all his perfections, unless the eye be led away captive by his beauty and be thus enabled to follow him._--I like the extravagance of that. So should the friend of man be extolled.