The phase of Arabian culture with which we are most nearly concerned is its poetic achievement, and the ultimate influence which it brought to bear upon Spanish literary composition. The poetry of this richly endowed and imaginative people had at the period of their entrance into Spain arrived, perhaps, at the apogee of splendour. Its warm and luxuriant genius was wholly antagonistic to the more restrained and disciplined verse of Greece and Rome, which it regarded as cold, formal, and quite unworthy of translation. It surpassed in bold and extravagant hyperbole, fantastic imagery, and emotional appeal. The Arab poet heaped metaphor upon metaphor. He was incapable of seeing that that which was intrinsically beautiful in itself might appear superfluous and lacking in taste when combined with equally graceful but discordant elements. Many critics hasten to reassure us regarding his judgment and discrimination. But even a slight acquaintance with Arabic literature will show that they have been carried away by their prejudice in favour of the subject on which they wrote. In the garden of the Arabian poet every flower is a jewel, every plot is a silken carpet, tapestried with the intricate patterns of the weavers of Persia, and every maiden is a houri, each of whose physical attributes becomes in turn the subject of a glowing quatrain. The constant employment of synonym and superlative, the extravagance of amorous emotion, and the frequent absence of all message, of that large utterance in which the poets of the West have indicated to the generation they served how it might best grapple with problems of mind and soul--these were the weaknesses of the Arab singers. They made apophthegm take the place of message. They were unaware that the fabric of poetry is not only a palace of pleasure, but a great academy of the soul. The true love of nature, too, seems to have been as much lacking in the Arab as in the Greek and the Roman. He enamelled his theme with the meticulous care of a jeweller. Not content with painting the lily, he burnished it until it seemed a product of the goldsmith's art. To him nature was a thing not only to be improved upon, but to be surpassed, a mine of gems in the rough, to be patiently polished.