the rain, the wave, the flower, and beauty. Yet his first writings, for all their tenderness, are not free of revolt and wrath against tradition, whose trace we find in The Broken Wings and in some of the essays of A Tear and a Smile — and this before he knew Nietzsche. Then we see him, after his reading of Thus Spake Zarathustra, bring out the book The Tempests, a collection of essays in which the influence of the philosopher of power shows. He opens it with the essay of "The Grave-Digger," who buries the heaped corpses of men — that is, their superstitions and their delusions — as Zarathustra did when he buried the corpse of the fallen rope-dancer:

And in "The Decayed Teeth" he assails pity as Nietzsche assailed it, and addresses men with sarcasm: "I used to pity your weakness, sons of my mother; but pity multiplies the weak and increases the number of the idle, and profits life nothing. Today I have come to see your weakness, and my soul shudders with disgust and shrinks in disdain."

Yet Gibran stops at the limit of revolt and demolition, and lays down no doctrine of his own for building, as Nietzsche did. Hence we see him in his remaining works swerve away from him visibly, and return to the idealist bent that had appeared in his first writings, where in A Tear and a Smile he sang of love and hymned beauty, and believed, like the mystics, in the soul's emanation from the Universal Spirit and its return to it in the end.

The mystical bent grew stronger in him by degrees and crystallized in the book The Prophet, which shows us the summit of the spiri-tual growth of which he dreamed. And this is the book in which they allege that he imitated Nietzsche.

The book runs to a hundred-odd pages; Gibran put it in the mouth of a prophet called Almustafa, as Nietzsche's book was put in the mouth of an Eastern prophet, Zarathustra. The author of Gibran's biography, Mikhail Naimy, has pointed to the resem-

blances between the two books in three places. The first is that Almustafa and Zarathustra both spread their teachings among men and then return to their solitude. In fact, Gibran's prophet delivers his sermons all at once, just before his final return to his birth-place; whereas Nietzsche's prophet comes down from the mountains to pour out the treasures in his heart, then goes back to solitude to gather new pearls, and returns to scatter them among men a second time.

The second place is that each of them, shortly before his going, addresses the sea and dreams of going down to it. But Zarathustra's return to the sea symbolizes the sufferings he must undergo to reach the highest degrees of happiness and growth — he says, "the greatest moun-tains have their source in the sea" — whereas the return of Gibran's prophet to the sea means mystical union: the return of the spirit to its source, the return of the drop to

the sea and of the partial spirit to the Universal Spirit, "a boundless drop in a boundless ocean."

The third place: that each of them promises his companions to return to them when they deny him or forget him.

Zarathustra does in fact return to them, descending from the moun-tains in which he had settled. But Almustafa adds, saying: "another woman shall bear me." His return to his companions thus means the reincarnation of his spirit in a new body, and points to the doctrine of transmigration in which Gibran believed.

So where Naimy sees a place of resemblance, we see in fact places of difference.

And if we alleged that Gibran took from Nietzsche his style, so rich in images and symbols, we should again be wrong. For he began his writing life with this poetic style —

much broken into cadences and refrains, teeming with fancies and