dead earth," and grass springs, and "tall leafy palm-trees with their
date-clusters hanging round. Is not that a sign?" Your cattle too,--Allah
made them; serviceable dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you
have your clothing from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking
home at evening-time, "and," adds he, "and are a credit to you!" Ships
also,--he talks often about ships: Huge moving mountains, they spread out
their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there, Heaven's wind
driving them; anon they lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they
lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What miracle would you
have? Are not you yourselves there? God made you, "shaped you out of a
little clay." Ye were small once; a few years ago ye were not at all. Ye
have beauty, strength, thoughts, "ye have compassion on one another." Old
age comes on you, and gray hairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye
sink down, and again are not. "Ye have compassion on one another:" this
struck me much: Allah might have made you having no compassion on one
another,--how had it been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance
at first-hand into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic
genius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. A
strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong wild man,--might
have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He
sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude
Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see: That
this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing;
is a visual and factual Manifestation of God's power and presence,--a
shadow hung out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more.
The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate
themselves "like clouds;" melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! He
figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain