The nations who possessed a classical poetry, in imitating nature, had discovered the use of the epic and the drama, in which the poet endeavors to express the true language of the human heart. The people of the East, with the exception of the Hindus, never made this attempt--their poetry is entirely lyric; but under whatever name it may be known, it is always found to be the language of the passions. The poetry of the Arabians is rhymed like our own, and the rhyming is often carried still farther in the construction of the verse, while the uniformity of sound is frequently echoed throughout the whole expression. The collection made by Aboul Teman (fl. 845 A.D.) containing the Arabian poems of the age anterior to Mohammed, and that of Taoleti, which embraces the poems of the subsequent periods, are considered the richest and most complete anthologies of Arabian poetry. Montanebbi, a poet who lived about 1050, has been compared to the Persian Hafiz.
7. THE ARABIAN TALES.--If the Arabs have neither the epic nor the drama, they have been, on the other hand, the inventors of a style of composition which is related to the epic, and which supplies among them the place of the drama. We owe to them those tales, the conception of which is so brilliant and the imagination so rich and varied: tales which have been the delight of our infancy, and which at a more advanced age we can never read without feeling their enchantment anew. Every one is acquainted with the "Arabian Nights Entertainments;" but in our translation we possess but a very small part of the Arabian collection, which is not confined merely to books, but forms the treasure of a numerous class of men and women, who, throughout the East, find a livelihood in reciting these tales to crowds, who delight to forget the present, in the pleasing dreams of imagination. In the coffee-houses of the Levant, one of these men will gather a silent crowd around him, and picture to his audience those brilliant and fantastic visions which are the patrimony of Eastern imaginations. The public squares abound with men of this class, and their recitations supply the place of our dramatic representations. The physicians frequently recommend them to their patients in order to soothe pain, to calm agitation, or to produce sleep; and these story-tellers, accustomed to sickness, modulate their voices, soften their tones, and gently suspend them as sleep steals over the sufferer.