lated it into Arabic. Among these
Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.

'Ilyas the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
'Neath wings of Death--'mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.

'"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help--"Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."

'The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;
'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
"Sleep fans my brow: sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land."

'"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings
A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:"
A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze.
Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.

'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial
film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of
love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no
real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly
be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic
element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards
sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such
as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune
of universal love and beauty.'

This was followed by a still more mystical poem called 'The Persian
Slave Girl's Progress to Paradise,' showing the Omnipot