But the Koran has eclipsed all that ever went before it or came after it in the eyes of the Arabs. It is the paragon of literary perfection as well as of moral beauty. Its style is inimitable because it is Divine in the highest sense of the word. To criticise its diction is to be guilty of blasphemy and to compare it with other literature is to commit sacrilege. There is no doubt that the chief charm of the Koran from a literary standpoint is its musical jingle and cadence. It is such as the Arabs, the earliest masters of rhyme, love, and servilely imitate in all their later prose works. Our English translations of the Koran, although accurate, (and even idiomatic, as Palmer’s) cannot reproduce this; in consequence the book appears vapid, monotonous and to the last degree wearisome and uninteresting. Attempts have been made by Burton and others to acquaint English readers with this element of beauty in Mohammed’s revelation. The following[89] is almost equal to the Arabic itself, and, to say the least, sounds more interesting than Sale’s prose version of the same passage: “I swear by the splendor of light And by the silence of night That the Lord shall never forsake thee Nor in His hatred take thee; Truly for thee shall be winning Better than all beginning Soon shall the Lord console thee, grief no longer control thee, And fear no longer cajole thee. Thou wert an orphan-boy, yet the Lord found room for thy head. When thy feet went astray, were they not to the right path led? Did He not find thee poor, yet riches around thee spread? Then on the orphan-boy, let thy proud foot never tread, And never turn away the beggar who asks for bread, But of the Lord’s bounty ever let praise be sung and said.” It is not to be expected that all the transcendant excellencies and miraculous beauties which Moslem commentators find in the Koran should unveil themselves to cold, unsympathizing western gaze, but that the book has a certain literary beauty no one can deny who has read it in the original. As Penrice says in his preface to his Dictionary of the Koran, “Beauties there are many and great; ideas highly poetical are clothed in rich and appropriate language, which not unfrequently rises to a sublimity far beyond the reach of any translation; but it is unfortunately the case that many of those graces which present themselves to the admiration of the finished scholar are but so many stumbling-blocks in the way of the beginner; the marvellous conciseness which adds so greatly to the force and energy of its expressions cannot fail to perplex him while the frequent use of the ellipse leaves in his mind a feeling of vagueness not altogether out of character in a work of its oracular and _soi-disant_ prophetic nature.”