East, harbouring followers of every creed and sect--Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, Ṣábians and Ṣúfís, Materialists and Rationalists--must have seemed to the provincial almost like a new world. It is certain that Abu ’l-‘Alá, a curious observer who set no bounds to his thirst for knowledge, would make the best use of such an opportunity. The religious and philosophical ideas with which he was now first thrown into contact gradually took root and ripened. His stay in Baghdád, though it lasted only a year and a half (1009-1010 A.D.), decided the whole bent of his mind for the future. Whether his return to Ma‘arra was hastened, as he says, by want of means and the illness of his mother, whom he tenderly loved, or by an indignity which he suffered at the hands of an influential patron,[581] immediately on his arrival he shut himself in his house, adopted a vegetarian diet and other ascetic practices, and passed the rest of his long life in comparative seclusion:-- "Methinks, I am thrice imprisoned--ask not me Of news that need no telling-- By loss of sight, confinement to my house, And this vile body for my spirit's dwelling."[582] We can only conjecture the motives which brought about this sudden change of habits and disposition. No doubt his mother's death affected him deeply, and he may have been disappointed by his failure to obtain a permanent footing in the capital. It is not surprising that the blind and lonely man, looking back on his faded youth, should have felt weary of the world and its ways, and found in melancholy contemplation of earthly vanities ever fresh matter for the application and development of these philosophical ideas which, as we have seen, were probably suggested to him by his recent experiences. While in the collection of early poems, entitled _Saqṭu ’l-Zand_ or 'The Spark of the Fire-stick' and mainly composed before his visit to Baghdád, he still treads the customary path of his predecessors,[583] his poems written after that time and generally known as the _Luzúmiyyát_[584] arrest attention by their boldness and originality as well as by the sombre and earnest tone which pervades them. This, indeed, is not the view of most Oriental critics, who dislike the poet's irreverence and fail to appreciate the fact that he stood considerably in advance of his age; but in Europe he has received full justice and perhaps higher praise than he deserves. Reiske describes him as 'Arabice callentissimum, vasti, subtilis, sublimis et audacis ingenii';[585] Von Hammer, who ranks him as a poet with Abú Tammám, Buḥturí, and Mutanabbí, also mentions him honourably as a philosopher;[586] and finally Von Kremer, who made an exhaustive study of the _Luzúmiyyát_ and examined their contents in a masterly essay,[587] discovered in Abu ’l-‘Alá, one of the greatest moralists of all time whose profound genius anticipated much that is commonly attributed to the so-called modern spirit of enlightenment. Here Von