That "large Infidel" might well have written such a stanza as From Earth's dark centre unto Saturn's Gate I've solved all problems of this world's Estate, From every snare of Plot and Guile set free, Each bond resolved, saving alone Death's Fate.
His hymn to the Deity might have been written by Plato and rivals the famous one of Cleanthes.( 14) A casual reader gets a very favorable impression of Avicenna.

The story of his dominion over the schools in the Middle Ages is one of the most striking in our history.

Perhaps we feel that Leclerc exaggerates when he says: "Avicenna is an intellectual phenomenon.

Never perhaps has an example been seen of so precocious, quick and wide an intellect extending and asserting itself with so strange and indefatigable an activity." The touch of the man never reached me until I read some of his mystical and philosophical writings translated by Mehren.( 15) It is Plato over again.

The beautiful allegory in which men are likened to birds snared and caged until set free by the Angel of Death might be met with anywhere in the immortal Dialogues.
The tractate on Love is a commentary on the Symposium; and the essay on Destiny is Greek in spirit without a trace of Oriental fatalism, as you may judge from the concluding sentence, which I leave you as his special message: "Take heed to the limits of your capacity and you will arrive at a knowledge of the truth! How true is the saying:--Work ever and to each will come that measure of success for which Nature has designed him." Avicenna died in his fifty-eighth year.