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who, according to the best light of their conscience, sought to 
worship and to serve Him. She said that this removed from her 
mind a load of doubt and perplexity, and that she was now able 
to look on the various disputes and controversies of which from 
time to time the faint echoes reached her, with calmness and con- 
solation. That aged peasant’s belief, and the announcement of 
those two old missionaries, form the basis of the philosophy of 
comparative religion. It is this sentiment which Southey en- 
deavoured to exemplify in the case of Mahomedanism, and of 
Hindoo Mythology, in these two poems. In “Thalaba” he took 
the one great Mahomedan virtue of resignation, and worked it out 
to the full. In doing so, heentered so completely into the genius of 
the Arabian world, that as we read the pages of “‘Thalaba,” we seem 
to be transported altogether beyond the range of European thought 
or European scenery. 
The first night that I ever spent in the desert, there came 
back to me, with a vividness occasioned by the exact and literal 
reproduction of the atmosphere around me, the lines which I have 
again and again repeated in my early boyhood, from the opening 
or Thalaba ”':— 
“ How beautiful is night ! 
A dewy freshness fills the silent air, 
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain, 
Breaks the serene of heaven : 
In full-orb’d glory yonder Moon divine 
Rolls through the dark blue depths. 
Beneath her steady ray 
The desert-circle spreads, 
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky. 
How beautiful is night !” 
Or again the passage further on, where his life in the tent is 
described (3rd Book of “Thalaba,” stanza 16) :— 
“Tt was the wisdom and the will of Heaven 
That, in a lonely tent, had cast 
The lot of Thalaba. 
There might his soul develope best 
Its strengthening energies ; 
