"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"

The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace; Then added, in the certainty of faith,

"And giveth Life that never more shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue

In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,

Drove o'er the sea that desert desolate

These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;

Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,

The wasting famine of the heart they fed,

And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry

That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai

Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand

Walked with them through the world, where'er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look

The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

SHE DWELT AMONG THE UNTRODDEN WAYS.

William Wordsworth.

SHE dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

THREE YEARS SHE GREW.

William Wordsworth.

THREE years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;

This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make

A Lady of mine own.

"Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse: and with me

The Girl, in rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power

To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;

And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm

Of mute insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the Storm,

Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

You meaner beauties of the night,

That poorly satisfy our eyes,
More by your number, than your light,

You common people of the skies;

What are you when the moon shall rise?

You curious chanters of the wood,

That warble forth Dame Nature's lays, Thinking your passions understood

By your weak accents; what's your praise, When Philomel her voice shall raise?

You violets that first appear,

By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the spring were all your own;
What are you when the rose is blown?