For we are to consider Mohammed, through these three-and-twenty years, as the centre of a world wholly in conflict, Battles with the Koreish and Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own wild heart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest no more.  In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel.  Forger and juggler?  No, no!  This great fiery heart, seething, 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, 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 Mohammed 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 Mohammed:  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.