hing,
simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler'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, practicing 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 vigor, 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