"Generation goeth and generation cometh," says Ecclesiastes, "while for ever the earth abideth. The sun riseth also and the sun goeth down and cometh panting back to his place where he riseth." . . . The early dawn, the time of scarlet eyes, was also when the caravan would be attacked. However, to this day the rising sun is worshipped by the Bedawi, despite the prohibition of Mahomet and despite the Moslem dictum that the sun rises between the devil's horns. Now the divinity of the stars (_quatrain_ 4) had been affirmed by Plato and Aristotle; it was said that in the heavenly bodies dwelt a ruling intelligence superior to man's, and more lasting.[2] And in Islam, whose holy house, the Kaaba, had traditionally been a temple of Saturn, we notice that the rationalists invariably connect their faith with the worship of Venus and other heavenly bodies. We are told by ash-Shahrastani, in his _Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects_, that the Indians hold Saturn for the greatest luck, on account of his height and the size of his body. But such was not Abu'l-Ala's opinion. "As numb as Saturn," he writes in one of his letters,[3] "and as dumb as a crab has every one been struck by you." Elsewhere he says in verse: If dark the night, old Saturn is a flash Of eyes which threaten from a face of ash. And the worship of Saturn, with other deities, is about a hundred years later resented by Clotilda, says Gregory of Tours, when she is moving Chlodovich her husband to have their son baptized. When the little boy dies soon after baptism, the husband does not fail to draw a moral. But misfortunes, in the language of an Arab poet, cling about the wretched even as a coat of mail (_quatrain_ 6) is on the warrior. This image was a favourite among the Arabs, and when Ibn Khallikan wants to praise the verses of one As Suli, he informs us that they have the reputation of delivering from sudden evil any person who recites them frequently. When this evil is complete, with rings strongly riven, it passes away while he thinks that nothing can dispel it. . . . We have mention in this quatrain of a winding-sheet, and that could be of linen or of damask. The Caliph Solaiman was so fond of damask that every one, even the cook, was forced to wear it in his presence, and it clothed him in the grave. Yet he, like other Moslems (_quatrain_ 10), would believe that he must undergo the fate recorded in a book. The expression that a man's destiny is written on his forehead, had its origin without a doubt, says Goldziher, in India. We have remarked upon the Indian ideas which had been gathered by Abu'l-Ala at Baghdad. There it was that he enjoyed the opportunity of seeing ships (_quatrain_ 11). He spent a portion of his youth beside the sea, at Tripoli. But in the capital were many boats whose fascination he would not resist,-- the Chinese junks laboriously dragged up from Bassora, and dainty gondolas of basket-work covered with asphalt.[4] However, though