though we must not read the Qur'anic dogmas into it:

It boots not to hide from God aught evil within your breasts:
it will not be hid—what men would hold back from God, He knows.
It may be its meed comes late: in the Book is the wrong set down
for the reckoning day; it may be that vengeance is swift and stern.¹

The poet Labid is one of those in whom the religious temper most frequently appears. He was a contemporary of Muhammad, and in his later years became a Moslem. His poetical work belongs, however, to the days before his conversion. It is an indication that the convention of poetry was felt to be irreligious, that he is said after his conversion to have abjured poetry altogether, and even to have been unwilling to recall his own poems. The following passage is pre-Islamic:

Yea, the righteous shall keep the way of the righteous,
and to God turn the steps of all that abideth;
And to God ye return, ye too: with Him only
rest the issues of things and all that they gather.
All that is in His book of knowledge is reckoned,
and before Him revealed lies all that is hidden:
Both the day when His gifts of goodness on those whom
He exalts are as palms full-freighted with sweetness,

Young and burdened with fruit, their heads bowed with clusters
swelling to bursting, the tallest e'en as the lesser;
And the day when avails the sin-spotted only
prayer for pardon and grace to lead him to mercy,
And the good deeds he wrought to witness before him
and the pity of Him who is Compassion:
Yea, a place in His shade, the best to abide in,
a heart still and steadfast, right-walking, honest.¹

One or two other poets have been pointed to as showing more direct evidences of the impact of Jewish or Christian ideas upon the Arab mind—chief among them Samau'al, a Jewish poet of Taima, and Umayya b. Abi as-Salt, a Medinan almost contemporary with Muhammad. In regard to both of them there are questions of genuineness regarding their poems which are not yet quite clear. But Umayya at any rate is of some importance, for he seems independently to have made use of some of the ideas as to a future life which Muhammad pressed home in the Qur'an.² The passages which have been quoted from such well-known and typical Arab poets as Zuhair and Labid may, however, serve to show that a more spiritual view of life does sometimes appear in their poetry.

Had Christianity produced a deep impression upon Arabia, it would no doubt have burst through the convention which confined poetry to the subject and temper of the old desert life, or at least have produced a religious literature of its own. But it was left to Islam to bring