One hears of Mohammed's beauty:
his fine sagacious honest face, brown florid complexion, beaming black
eyes;--I somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled-up black
when he was in anger: like the "horse-shoe vein" in Scott's
_Red-gauntlet_. It was a kind of feature in the Hashem family, this
black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet had it prominent, as would
appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of
wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out
his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.
How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and
travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed
all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her
gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is
altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors.
He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He seems to have
lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way with this wedded
benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against
the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely
unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of
his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mission from
Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after his
fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died.
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