Of all Arabic poetry, the Koran is the master-piece; in it the lightning of sublimity gleams through the dreary obscurity of long prosy traditions and ordinances, and the energetic language rolls like the thunder of heaven, reverberating from rock to rock, in the echo of the rhyme; or pours on like the roaring of the wave, in the constant return of similar sounding words. It stands the glorious pyramid of Arabic poetry; no poet of this people, either before or since, has approached its excellence. Lebid, one of the seven great bards, whose works were called _al-moallakat_, the suspended, because they hung on the walls of the Kaaba for public admiration, tore his own down, as unworthy of the honour, the moment he had read the sublime exordium of the second sura of the Koran. Hassan, the satirist, who lampooned the prophet, on which verses of the Koran descended from heaven, was forced, at the conquest of Mecca, to confess the irresistible power of his word and his sword; and Kaab, the son of Soheir, paid him spontaneous homage, in a hymn of praise, for which the prophet gave him his mantle, which is still preserved among the precious articles of the Turkish treasury; and is annually, during the month Ramadan, worshipped and touched, in the most solemn manner, by the Sultan, accompanied by his court and the great officers of state. Mohammed’s lofty destiny, in changing from poet to prophet, has induced many later Arabian poets and beaux esprits to attempt the like; the consequences of which have either been nugatory, or fraught with their own destruction. Moseleima, a cotemporary of Mohammed, and, like him, the poet of nature, nevertheless, soon became dangerous to him, as the unattainable divinity of the Koran had not yet received the sanction of ages. Ibn Mokaffaa, the elegant translator of the Fables of Bidpai, who shut himself up for whole weeks, to produce a single verse which might bear a comparison with the lofty passage of the Koran, on the deluge,—“Earth, swallow thy waters! Heaven, withhold thy cataracts!”—earned by his fruitless labours nothing but the reputation of a free-thinker; and Motenebbi, whose name signifies the “prophecying,” gained, indeed, the glory of a great poet, but never that of a prophet. Thus, for twelve centuries, the Koran has maintained, undisturbed, the character of an inimitable and uncreated celestial Scripture, as the eternal Word of God. The word of the prophet is the Soonna, that is, the collection of his orations and oral commands, which, no less than in the written Koran, by vivid fancy, energy of will, power of language, and knowledge of mankind, manifest the genius of the great poet and legislator. The former has never been estimated in the view we have just taken of it: the latter will be considered in the sequel.