The Kasidah consists of about 300 couplets of remarkable vigor in condensation. It reviews all the explanations of "the sorry scheme of things" that man has contrived, and it holds forth the writer's own view. He maintains that happiness and misery are equally divided, and distributed in this world. Self cultivation is, in his view, the sole sufficient object of human life, with due regard for others. The affections, the sympathies, and "the divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments. He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions." This is pure agnosticism. There runs all through the poem a sad note that heightens the courage with which the writer faces his own bleak conclusion, and, "the tinkling of the camel bell" is heard faint and far in the surge of his investive, or below the deepest deep of his despair. In Arabia, Death rides a camel, instead of a white horse, as our occidental myth has it, and the camel's bell is the music to which all life is attuned. Burton reverts from time to time to this terrifying tintinnabulation, but he blends it with the suggested glamour of evening, until the terror merges into tenderness. The recurrence of this minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the "Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the sorrow at the heart of things. It is worthy, in its power, of the praise of Browning, Swinburne, Theodore Watts, Gerald Massey. It is Edward Fitz Gerald minus the vine and the rose, and ali Persian silkiness. The problem he sets out to solve, and he solves it by a petitio principii, is Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of Must, Without our leave or ask or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust? The impermanence of things oppresses him, for he says in an adieu, . . . Haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the self-same man shall meet; the years shall make us other men. He crams into one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming Sodom-fruit, with stones that bear the shape of bread." There is an echo of Koleleth in his contempt for the divinity of the body. It is unclean without, impure within. The vanity of vanity is proclaimed with piteous indignation.