skilled painter? —

For when she speaks of the sky, you would think its clouds grown blue, its sun radiant, its twilight luminous; and if she mentions the dry land, it grows green and dewy between her fingertips. She lets you hear the purl of the brook, the surging of the great sea, and the stillness of the desert, and shows you the beauty of its oases, its brightness, and its glittering mirage.

In her portraits of the personalities she set down you see — for she brought the unknown of their lights out into the open — her fine, comprehensive analysis, her coloring of their portraits with art and taste, her clothing them in garments in harmony with their souls — so that we loved them as she herself loved them. Is not her description of Bahithat al-Badiya as a writer original in its expressions? She says: "The alphabet belongs to all mankind, and people ordinarily understand one another only through speech. What then is that power, given to some, to draw with letters faces and the manner of their roundness; lips and the edges of their folds; horizons and their endless breadth; night and its depth and its stars; the soul and the wonders of its hidden places? And how does there pulse, in bare and lifeless words, a swift and kindled life — with the storm of feeling, the raging of anger, the moaning of complaint, the ringing of success and triumph? And why do words tremble at one moment like strings, and wail at another like the waves of the roaring sea, and whisper a wondrous whisper, as though it came forth from the abyss of the generations and the dimness of the farthest hopes?"

Then, after all she has written and created, she says: "Why have you brought me into being, O universe, and what do you want of me?" And of whom should it want anything, pray, if not of her — she whose cup brims over with rare intelligence and a piercing, leaping thought, and two eyes that penetrate the living and the lifeless, joining themselves to it with a radiant, creative power that makes of its spirit and its clay speaking tongues for the

children of her generation and for the generations to come.

And her existence will have a meaning that spurs on women's thought — saying, as she herself once said of Madame de Sévigné: Forward, women, forward!

And her name will be given to one of our streets, so that every class will pronounce her name and long to know her struggle and her nobility.

And her books will be taught in

the schools and the universities, so that her lofty spirit may work its way into the rising generation — this spirit which stamps her writings with its mark before they are signed with her name; for her spirit is in the lines and between them, fluttering, soaring to the upper regions, to what is unseen, bringing every distant thing near to the understanding by its beauty and its heavenly breathings.