Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/418

384 principles upon which the prosody of the Arabs is founded. The invariable unit, upon which Arabic (and Persian) verse is built, is the beit or line (usually but improperly rendered “couplet”). The word beit signifies literally “a house,” but by analogy “a tent” (and from this we may fairly conclude at least this fundamenral part of Arabic prosody to have originated with the Bedouins or Arabs of the desert, as it is only they who would be likely to call a tent a house) the verse being whimsically regarded by the Arabs as an erection; and this simile is carried out in the nomenclature of the different parts of the line, one foot being called a “tent-pole,” another a “tent-peg” and the two hemistichs of the verse being known as the folds or leaves of the double door of the tent. Each beit is divided into two hemistichs of equal length, each containing three or four feet of two, three, four or five syllables, and the whole verse is known as a hexameter or octameter, according as it contains six or eight feet, or from sixteen to thirty-two syllables. A peculiarity of Arabic verse is the excess of long syllables over short and the absence of the dactyl and dibrach, the swiftest feet in use among Europeans, a characteristic which produces a graver and more stately movement of the rhythm than is common in European poetry. I should perhaps, however, observe that the qualifications “long” and “short” are somewhat empirically applied to the