Our fathers' faith, our fathers' God,
The paths of peace wherein they trod,
With love, with truth, thy soul be shod,
O Israel, sweet Israel.

ROBERT LOVEMAN.

The Everlasting Jew
(From "Hellas")

HE Jew of whom I spake is old, so old

THE

He seems to have outlived a world's decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he; his hair and beard
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct

With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift

To the winter wind; but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumèd thought which pierces
The present, and the past, and the to-come.

Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the past, and sees

The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and loveliness,

And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles-it is much.

I honor thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not

What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;

Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,:
Can make the future present-let it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours!
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.

PERCY BYSSHe Shelley.

Jews

PRIDE and humiliation hand in hand

Walked with them through the world where'er they went,

Trampled and beaten were as the sand,

And yet as 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.

ANONYMOUS.

Israel's Spiritual Lamp
(From "The Spanish Gypsy")

IABIDE

By that wise spirit of listening reverence Which marks the boldest doctors of our race. For Truth, to us, is like a living child Born of two parents: if the parents part And will divide the child, how shall it live? Or, I will rather say: Two angels guide The paths of man, both aged and yet young, As angels are, ripening through endless years. On one he leans: some call her Memory, And some Tradition; and her voice is sweet, With deep mysterious accords: the other, Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams A light divine and searching on the earth, Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields

Yet clings with loving cheek, and shines anew,
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked,
But for Tradition; we walk evermore

To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp.
GEORGE ELIOT.

The Spirit of Hebraism

THEY tell me my spirit's departed,
That my body of soul is bereft ;
And that barren 'midst strangers I wander
And that no inspiration is left

But my vanishing fires ancestral

Where the last faint flashes are seen,
And that like to the poor and the stranger,
What is left by the world I glean.

They tell me, not knowing my Spirit
Like an ember that never grows cold,

Tho' smouldering in its own ashes
Yet murmurs and grows as of old.
Oh, my Spirit awaits but my seeking.
To burst like a spring from the soil,
And if once it be free from confinement
It will vest in all fruit of my toil.

It will live in the colors on canvas,
And survive in the hewn marble plan,
And in song and in music and story

To the last generation of man.

It will speak from the lips of new Prophets,

And their truth from the heights will be hurled,

From a model city of Justice

Where its flag will blazon unfurled. '

From the Hebrew of HARRY WOLFSOHN.

(Translated by H. B. Ehrmann.)

Zion's Universal Temple

UNDER the Orient skies of sapphire where the sun

is all aglow,

With a radiance far surpassing all the western climes can know,

There's a pathos haunting ever in the sunlight's splendor there

For old Zion's temple mould'ring, for old Zion once so fair.

But away with all this moaning that is playing fast and loose

With the sentiments sure tending now to break a people's truce;

For affection once divided, try it may, can never stand As the symbol of the union that shall mark Messiah's land

Vision-traced Messiah's land,

Where true love shall sway its wand.
Love the token

Of unbroken

Peace, that lords at God's command.

Liquid gold of sun's own moulding bent to make a world-wide dome,

Shall in future roof the temple marking every nation's

home:

Paved by earth and sea together, shall its tesselated

floor

On its huge mosaic gather all the nations that adoreNations that shall soon adore

Zion's God of cherished yore,

With the pæans

That the æons

Echo shall forevermore.

HARRY WEISS.

A Song of Israel

ISRAEL! wanderer through the weary years
Of wild unrest;

A world-wide pilgrimage of hopes and fears,
Sometimes in joy, but oft'ner far in tears,
As God knows best.

Since Jacob laid him down that night to sleep
On Bethel's stone,

And saw the angel legions downward sweep,
Their watch around the fugitive to keep-
Never alone.

Beside the majestic Nile, on Egypt's sand,
He pitched his tent;

There on the desert saw the uplifted hand,
In cloud and fire still pointing to the land
Of sweet content.

Beside the Euphrates, where Babylon's wall
So proudly stood

He saw the giant empires rise and fall,
A captive exile, yet unharmed through all,
Beside that flood.

And when in wrath the Roman eagles came
To Zion's Hill,

And drove him out in thunder and in flame,
A stranger in the earth-Jehovah's name
Upheld him still.

See yonder, on the snow-clad Russian plain,
His children driven,

Beset and hunted by the imperial train

Like sheep by wolves. But surely not in vain They cry to Heaven.