Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BEDOUIN'S GREETING THE firmament of Heaven, and all the host Of stars, marshalled in shining companies, Throbbing and beating out in ecstasies Incessant light:—the silent, waveless coast Of the great desert, glimmering like a ghost Beside the living world of green and trees— My eye knows nothing round me saving these, And all I am, in them is merged and lost. My heart beats in my ear—so all alone I seem—when suddenly, at my right hand, A gradual footstep crushes the hard sand, And a voice calls in deep and quiet tone— ' Peace unto thee'—O God, I understand Why man is bound to man, and loves his own! A KHAMSEEN A STIFLING amber gloom fills all the air, And thro' the gloom a sick sun palely peers; With fiercely-beating blast that stings and sears The eyeballs and the nostrils and the hair, A wind as from a furnace, when men dare To take the molten metal from its mouth, Covers the trees with desolating drouth Of barren sand, the deserts lightly spare. But, lo! the North wind comes, and with his might, Until the sun shines and the skies are free, Buffets the gathered gloom, and drives apace, In struggling shapes across the Heaven's face, Dark tides of sand, which fast before him flee Like hosts of Titans in tumultuous flight. AN EGYPTIAN NIGHT The tamarisks that stand about the well, Let down the twilight of their woven hair, And on the surface of the water there, Three stars beside a moon immovable, Like glow worms round a white flower in a dell, Shine placidly; far off in many a mile Of sleeping silver flows the sacred Nile, Between tall palm-trees standing sentinel. Westward, beyond the dark verge of the green, The white wastes of the desert stretch away ; There solitude and silence hold twin sway, ...