Amin Nakhle writes his letters "as if they were the embroidery of velvet or the fringe of silk," and "The Country Notebook" is a color in literature — letters have known no letters purer than these.... Long has this elegant man of letters been absent from the world of letters; what, then, might he carry back from his long absence?
... An auspicious arrival, and a blessed return — God willing!
And welcome, welcome to the moon; and O my joy at the green color, and the infant breeze, and the pursing of the bud's mouth, and the stirring of the sparrow.... And were it not for the heaviness of the lowlands, the countryside would rise to its feet for April, as one rises for the great and honored.
O rain, O rescue, O best of comers: the earth is a clamor of running water, a trembling of delight, toward white blossom that laughs and beams, like notes of trysts unfolding.... Who, then, will go to the far-off one who left us and say to him: April has come, so come to us — you would rise from distance to nearness, from parting to meeting, and to a breeze among friends!!
And you, dark-skinned peasant, with your hand roughened from labor, who went out at the first stirring of the day to a field like a bride's kerchief, and when you had gone round a thousand plots and streamed with sweat, leaned your back against a tree trunk and sat measuring out the wind:
Much good may it do you — a sweat of health, God willing.
... And the white butterfly settles and rises — yet she neither settled nor rose; rather she came on the current of the air, feeling with the tips of her wings for the leaf of the plant, and when she sensed the dampness near, she took off upon the wing.
And O the sweetness of her perch
between two leaves! You ask yourself then: green? white? A plant with a soul, or a soul in a plant?!!
... And in a certain garden there was a bulbul who, in the seasons of song, would burst out over spring, and he would not leave the garden until its shoulders shook with the eloquence! Once the trees of the garden came to him and said:
You spend your life in singing to us, so we have come now to thank you for this long song, and to pray God to preserve your throat from hoarseness.... And when the next spring came, the bulbul left off his singing, and the heart of the garden was stricken with longing in the absence of eloquence.
And here is the first leaf the almond tree puts out, in the new spring. O the joy of the eyes at the little treasure, hanging there! — a herald of good tidings that spring has arrived, and
a title page for the book whose chapters turn upon freshness and dew and the sprinkling of blossom, and upon the arts of song above the trees.
And it is as if the house, at this small green leaf, could almost, for very joy, leap up on two feet.... For hope is behind the door!
So may God not send us, in this outpouring of gladness, someone to spoil it for us, who comes saying that the beloved leaf has sprouted on the almond tree just where its sister sprouted last spring.... And the bulbul is in our garden, so the festival is in full swing: cries raining down upon the leaves, two wings preening ornament upon adornment, a red beak wiping itself against green; and night, as you know, is the cage of the nightingales — and it is as if the bulbul at morning had slipped from the hand of night and burst out crying, safe from the night and commanding the night....