المعلقات السبع (The Seven Suspended Odes — Arabic text with English)

by God in store for a later generation. The history of its literature, properly speaking, dates only from as early as the beginning of the 6th century. Yet, within so short a period of time, extending indeed over not more than two centuries, the Arabs succeeded in carrying their literature to such an elevated pitch as earned them an immortal name among the most refined nations of the literary world.

Their progress was marvellously rapid in every department of literature—poetry, oratory, rhetoric, politics, history, moral and mental philosophy. The greater part of their early literature, however, consisted of poetry, which was the principal and almost the only record the ancient Arabs possessed, and it is said with perfect truth that ‘ Poetry is the record of the Arabs’ original: الشعر ديوان العرب. Poetry was the record of their usages, their customs, their habits, their ways of living, their wars, their virtues, their vices, their domestic affairs, their social advancement, their mercantile dealings, their creeds and beliefs, their sentiments, their moral progress, and in short all that would interest both a historian and a moralist.

The Arab minds were cast by nature in poetical moulds of the best type, and their speeches even were mostly poetical, or such as could readily be converted into rhythmical numbers. They had at that time no rules of grammar or versification to guide them; and yet their verses were scrupulously accurate and hardly ever went wrong. They had neither any fixed criterion of rhetoric, nor any canons of criticism; yet their idioms, expressions, images, similes and metaphors, were as accurate, as clear, as lucid, and as perspicuous as any of the subsequently established schools of the Post-Islamic times. One of the distinctive features of the primitive literature of the Arabs was that it possessed the real and rare beauty of being a faithful representation of nature, inasmuch as their images were derived directly from nature, and their composition was