"The Heart of Lebanon" is a piece of a poet's heart, a canvas from a painter's brush, and the handiwork of a man of letters who knows how to enter his subject and choose for it the mold that moves the soul.
For as you read in it, tedium finds no way into your soul; rather you feel yourself on a true excursion carrying you from one outskirt to another. For Rihani lets nothing fall under his eye, or stir his feeling, without conveying it to you with fidelity and devotion. He is abundant in imagination, strong in sensation, delicate in feeling. And these, upon my life, are the qualities of the man of letters, the poet, and the artist. He is, moreover, quick of observation; his mind is like a "camera" that leaves nothing without taking a moving picture of it. For that reason you feel, while in Ameen's company, as though you were watching a scene from the moving pictures...
To all this is added a precision in drawing conclusions and a soundness in comparison. And here the role returns to Ameen the reformer and thinker.
In truth, you can scarcely find a fixed definition of the personality that was at work in "The Heart of Lebanon." Is it the personality of the reformer and thinker, or is it the personality of the poet and artist? The fact is that Rihani's personality in its entirety volunteered for the work in "The Heart of Lebanon." Here Rihani leaps, whole, into the heart of Lebanon, bearing in his hands a heart overflowing with love of Lebanon. He brought with him likewise his lofty feeling, to sing Lebanon an immortal poem; he brought his brush, to paint of Lebanon a clear and well-loved picture; and he brought as well the teacher's staff and the guide's wisdom, and so he guided and taught with the best that teaching can be and the best that guidance can be.
Nor, after all, is "The Heart of Lebanon" a book deserving the attention of the Lebanese alone; it is a book to which every lover of knowledge will hasten, because it is an immortal portrait of an immortal land.
And if Rihani closed his eyes before the ink of this book had yet dried... and if he departed with the images of the heart of Lebanon, the heart of Iraq, and the kings of the Arabs dancing between his eyelids, it is because he was the man who knew how to win the love of every Lebanese and every Arab — and this love will remain, firm and strong, in the heart of every Lebanese and in the heart of every Arab.
