Perhaps,
after the elemental splendour and storm of the final scene, what
clings most to the memory is how Shibli Bagarag, hard beset in the
Cave of Chrysolites, touched the great lion with the broken sapphire
hair of Garraveen; or again, how on the black coast of the enchanted
sea, wandering by moonlight, he found the sacred Lily, and tore it
up, and lo! its bulb was a palpitating heart of human flesh; or how
Bhanavar called the unwilling serpents too often, and failed to win
her beauty back, till, at an awful price she once more, and for the
last time, contrived to call her body-guard of snakes hissing and
screaming around her.
There is surely no modern book so unsullied as this is by the modern
spirit, none in which the desire to teach a lesson, to refer knowingly
to topics of the day, or worst of all, to be incontinently funny,
interferes less with the tender magic of Oriental fancy, or with the
childlike, earnest faith in what is utterly outside the limits of
experience. It belongs to that infancy of the world, when the happy
guileless human being still holds that somewhere there is a flower to
be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or a form of words to be spoken which
will reverse the humdrum laws of Nature, call up unwilling spirits
bound to incredible services, and change all this brown life of ours
to scarlet and azure and mother-of-pearl.
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