prolong his life. It is as though He who wills all things willed that Mikhail Naimy should remain, to write about his beloved friend this book, which is in truth the most enduring and most magnificent thing an Arab pen has yet left behind, in all that Arab pens have written.

"Gibran Khalil Gibran" is a mag-nificent canvas in the magnificent art, written by a man sure of himself and of his pen, about a man whose like life begrudges in every generation.

In this book are passages in which Naimy portrayed that tan-gled, complicated inner nature of Gibran's, which aspired to what is loftier than the dust and than the illusions of flesh and blood, while the dust drew him back to its breast.

In this book we find Gibran as Mikhail Naimy knew him — in his weakness and his strength, in the joys of his heart and its pains, in his poverty and in his wealth, in his dust and in his gold... We find the Gibran of life, not the Gibran of legends...

Gibran had become a legend among his own people and in his own country — a legend wrapped in mist; and it alarmed Mikhail Naimy, Gibran's intimate companion, that Gibran should become a legend in his own country. So he wrote this great book about his friend. Naimy did not forget that his book would anger many people, and that many would find in it an opening for gossip; but that did not concern him. He said his say about Gibran, and it was hard and severe: he called him to account in it for thought and word and even intention... He accompanied him from the first "waa-waa" to the last rattle, from birth to death, so that Gibran stood before us a man complete in his humanity — great because he is a human being who loves and hates, who is chaste and who is dissolute, who struggles and who weakens. Naimy excelled in depicting this violent struggle within Gibran, this conflict between the body and the spirit. And Gibran's greatness rests

precisely in this conflict that breaks out between the divine and the human in him — between what is, and what wills to be...

The book opens with an awesome chapter, the chapter of "The Death Agony"... a throat gurgling the last gurgle of death, in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York.

How magnificent that gurgle in Gibran's throat, which Naimy describes in words of blood and of fire...

Naimy's book on Gibran is a great tome such as Arab pens will not, for generations, be granted to equal, in the magnificence of its style and the depth of its thought...