To Mr. McCarthy's charming prose version I have to express my chief obligation. Those who know it will be able to discover for themselves to what extent I have literally followed, to what extent departed from, and to what extent expanded his prose. I confess to having made the freest use of my own fancy, and a number of the following quatrains have little or no verbal parallel in the original. Such, however, are never, in my judgment, foreign to Omar's man­ner of thought, but are rather explicit expressions of philosophy im­plicit in his verses.

The quatrains in celebration of the clay provide a case in point. Omar never tires of pondering the riddle of the dust—

and my verses but more particularly formulate a mystic materialism which, obviously, is the very heart of his philosophy. À propos the clay, the reader will miss that little book of the pots which