The Trees of the Green Land

Lebanon! Ah, mountain of inspiration...
I look at you with the eye of my head and see you beautiful...

I gaze at you with the eye of my feeling and I believe in beauty...
What, I wonder, is the secret of your beauty?
I long to fathom your essence, O majestic mountain...

O you on whom mankind sets its hopes, that they may delight in your beauty,
and bury their sorrows among the folds of your valleys.
Blessed are you, O people of Lebanon!
When you cast your eyes about you, you see beauty in its loftiest meanings — the beauty of nature!

Those trees that clothe your homeland,
those trees that have set it in the ranks of the beautiful countries, and that have given it their color — they are yours and in your keeping...

Your trees draw everything beautiful to you; delight, then, in beauty:

the beauty of faces, and the beauty of the soul.
Ah me — I say "beauty"!

And are you not thirsting for it?!
The breezes sent forth by the trees of your Lebanon caress your brows and lend them the loftiest beauty.
The sweetest pieces of poetry are from Lebanon.
And the most beautiful works of genius in painting are from Lebanon.
And everything beautiful is in Lebanon...
And all this beauty is owed to the trees of Lebanon.
The trees of Lebanon — the cedar, the cypress, the pine, the willow, the olive... What a fall these words have upon pure, living souls, and how beautiful is their sight to innocent, limpid eyes!

Suppose the Lebanese grew hard-hearted — and how far that is from them! — and consented to cut those beautiful trees from their fragrant, hallowed soil, so that their Lebanon became a mountain barren of all but thorns: how then would their life be, with paradise exchanged for an inferno?!
The beautiful, joyous birds would come no more...
And the Lebanese would be deprived of hearing the sweetest music and of beholding the loveliest of the Lord's creatures!
O people of Lebanon!
O majestic, secure, gifted people!
Your Lebanon is well-nigh the paradise of earth, as Eden is the paradise of heaven...
Would that I knew! Do you know why Eden was the paradise of eternity? Ah — because it is a grove full of trees...
O people of beauty! May this everlasting green be a blessing to you!!