Mohammed can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently:  I can work no miracles.  I?  “I am a Public Preacher”; appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures.  Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him.  Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly “a sign to you,” if your eyes were open!  This Earth, God made it for you; “appointed paths in it”; you can live in it, go to and fro on it.—­The clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mohammed they are very wonderful:  Great clouds, he says, born in the deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do they come from!  They hang there, the great black monsters; pour-down their rain-deluges “to revive a dead earth,” and grass springs, and “tall leafy palm-trees with their date-clusters hanging round.  Is not that a sign?” Your cattle too,—­Allah made them; serviceable dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you have your clothing from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking home at evening-time, “and,” adds he, “and are a credit to you”!  Ships also,—­he talks often about ships:  Huge moving mountains, they spread-out their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there, Heaven’s wind driving them; anon they lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot stir!  Miracles? cries he; What miracle would you have?  Are not you yourselves there?  God made you, “shaped you out of a little clay.”  Ye were small once; a few years ago ye were not at all.  Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts, “ye have compassion on one another.”  Old age comes-on you, and gray hairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and again are not.  “Ye have compassion on one another”:  this struck me much:  Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another,—­how had it been then!  This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand into the very fact of things.  Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man.  A strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart:  a strong wild man,—­might have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous.  He sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see:  That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a visual and tactual Manifestation of God’s-power and presence,—­a shadow hung-out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more.  The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate themselves “like clouds”; melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be!  He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it.  At the Last Day they shall disappear “like clouds”; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off