uggler's. His life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awful
Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an uncultured
semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to
him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a
hungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practising for a mess of
pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents,
continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and
cannot take him.

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had
rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the first
and last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,--nay, at
bottom, it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously,
through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint,
ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we
might almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the Book is
made-up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement enthusiastic
extempore preaching. He returns forever to the old stories of the
Prophets as they went current in the Arab memory: how Prophet after
Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses,
Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribe
and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them even
as he Mahomet was,--which is a great solace to him. These things he
repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again with wearisome
iteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, in
his forlorn garret, might con-over the Biographies of Authors in that
way! This is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all
this, comes ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer.
He has actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet: with a certain
directness and rugged vigour, he brings home still, to our heart, the
thing his own heart has been opened to. I make but little of his
praises of Allah, which many praise; they are borrowed I suppose
mainly from the Hebrew, at least they are far surpassed there. But the
eye that flashes direct into the heart of things, and _sees_ the truth
of them; this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's own
gift; which she bestows on all; but which only one in the thousand
does not cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call sincerity of vision;
the test of a sincere heart.

Mahomet can work no