"Two ways I love Thee: selfishly, And next, as worthy is of Thee. 'Tis selfish love that I do naught Save think on Thee with every thought; 'Tis purest love when Thou dost raise The veil to my adoring gaze. Not mine the praise in that or this, Thine is the praise in both, I wis."[448] Whether genuine or not, these lines, with their mixture of devotion and speculation--the author distinguishes the illuminative from the contemplative life and manifestly regards the latter as the more excellent way--serve to mark the end of the ascetic school of Ṣúfiism and the rise of a new theosophy which, under the same name and still professing to be in full accord with the Koran and the _Sunna_, was founded to some extent upon ideas of extraneous origin--ideas irreconcilable with any revealed religion, and directly opposed to the severe and majestic simplicity of the Muḥammadan articles of faith. [Sidenote: Umayyad literature.] [Sidenote: The decline of Arabian poetry not due to Muḥammad.] [Sidenote: The Umayyad poets.] The opening century of Islam was not favourable to literature. At first conquest, expansion, and organisation, then civil strife absorbed the nation's energies; then, under the Umayyads, the old pagan spirit asserted itself once more. Consequently the literature of this period consists almost exclusively of poetry, which bears few marks of Islamic influence. I need scarcely refer to the view which long prevailed in Europe that Muḥammad corrupted the taste of his countrymen by setting up the Koran as an incomparable model of poetic style, and by condemning the admired productions of the heathen bards and the art of poetry itself; nor remind my readers that in the first place the Koran is not poetical in form (so that it could not serve as a model of this kind), and secondly, according to Muḥammadan belief, is the actual Word of God, therefore _sui generis_ and beyond imitation. Again, the poets whom the Prophet condemned were his most dangerous opponents: he hated them not as poets but as propagators and defenders of false ideals, and because they ridiculed his teaching, while on the contrary he honoured and rewarded those who employed their talents in the right way. If the nomad minstrels and cavaliers who lived, as they sang, the free life of the desert were never equalled by the brilliant laureates of imperial Damascus and Baghdád, the causes of the decline cannot be traced to Muḥammad's personal attitude, but are due to various circumstances for which he is only responsible in so far as he founded a religious and political system that revolutionised Arabian society. The poets of the period with which we are now dealing follow slavishly in the footsteps of the ancients, as though Islam had never been. Instead of celebrating the splendid victories and heroic deeds of Moslem warriors, the bard living in a great city still weeps over the relics of his beloved's