Page:Arabian poetry for English readers.djvu/92

 Here his narrative seems to be interrupted by a storm of lightning and violent rain;—he nobly describes the shower, and the torrent which it produced down all the adjacent mountains; and, his companions retiring to avoid the storm, the drama (for the poem has the form of a dramatic pastoral) ends abruptly.

The metre is of the first species, called long verse, and consists of the bacckius or amphibrachys, followed by the first epitrite; or, in the fourth and eighth places of the distich, by the double iambus, the last syllable being considered as a long one: the regular form, taken from the second chapter of "Commentaries on Asiatic Poetry," is this:

"Amator