English Dictionary

It is filled with dreamfuls of Genii, and Houris, and beautiful slave girls, and the almost unimaginable pomp of the Commander of the Faithful, with his black banner; and oh! such moonlight nights, and illuminated pavilions, and sleeping boats upon silent streams, and the mufti, and the minaret, and the call to prayer, and the pilgrimages to Mecca, and the prodigious endurances of persecution and privation volunteered for what in our occidental selfishness of superstition is condemned as monstrous and madness, but what, if only by means of the medium of poetry through which we behold it, enforces a feeling that cannot be profane to call reverence, while we deny it our worship, and the creed, like the country,has with all its loveliness, its darkened places, and its many a tale of terror.