Lebanon!! It was a black day indeed, my poet friend, on which that tragedy was played out; it shook my being with a shaking

that I can never forget so long as I live. It was the day on which the master of the land — our new neighbor, and newly enriched — ordered life to be torn from all the trees, to plant in their place this massive building, which has shut off from me the sun and the light and the air. And no wonder, my friend, for these natural elements — sun, air, light, and the green of the trees — had a powerful working upon my soul, a spiritual exhilaration I cannot describe. Was not the little of them that seeped through to me — little as it was — a miniature picture of what exists and goes on around me, outside my room? Was it not they that beguiled me, and

lightened much of my pain, and made it easy for me to remain in constant touch with the nature of the earth and with the birds and beasts that flutter and creep upon it? Surely you — you the poet — will grant me that the green nature of the earth, its sun, and its open air have a profound importance in our lives, whose importance and whose captivating magic we scarcely realize so long as we still roam and frolic in its expanses on our own two feet.

Woe, then, to those monopolists among the profiteers of war! And woe, and woe again, to whoever squanders the ordering of the administration of this poor country's survival, and to those entrusted with protecting the lives of God's creatures and preserving the very being

of this martyred mountain — but for whose green nature and fresh gardens there would be no Lebanon, nor would these cedars of which they boast and vaunt themselves have lived..

It is truly astonishing that your book should have been heralded, a few hours before it reached me, by a dream that appeared to me, during which I was earnestly searching for two poems, one of them yours and the other by your late brother. There is a curious story to this dream, which I shall tell you when we meet.

Hardly had the book reached my hands than I hastened to turn the pages, hoping to come upon what had eluded my finding in the blackness of night. And how great was my amazement that the first thing my eyes should fall