That did not to his musings lone
A holy meaning lend.

The Poet-youth! what pageants now
Before his fancy shine?

Say dreameth he of the Baron's hall,
And the banquet's purple wine?
Or come the visions of elder days
Once more before his eye-
With shimmering shrines in forest-nooks
And pale girls watching by?

In vain the Faun with brimming gourd
May chaunt the Maenad hymn-

And the dreamy myth o'er its censers watch
In the temple's twilight dim-

On other themes doth the Poet muse
Than Faun or Antique Fane—
The green earth in this hour of peace
Awakes a nobler strain.

Oh Lord of Love,» hẻ murmurs low,

How bountiful thou art

Through all thy world in joy outbreathes The universal heart.

As tranquil is this valley now

As still these clustering trees

As the thin smoke that climbeth up

From yonder villages.

« Above-around-the soul directs

Its visionary flight

The very air sighs like a prayer

Of sainted Eremite.

How calm! the little shepherd-girl
That sitteth by the brook

By turns to pluck the water-cress
«And con her «sacred book, »

"A very Image is of Rest

An Emblem sanctified

"As though good Angels, as of old,
Were watching by her side.

Enough to fill the yearning heart
With Thanks-giving is here,

"When with so deep a benison

High heaven to earth draws near. »

«Ho! Ho!» quoth Time 't'is wondrous well "Sir Poet! but years steal past;

"And the colours that flush thy heart to-day Shall wither and drop at last.

'T'is the Poet's lot to feast,

"And the golden altar where he kneels
Lacks not or fee or Priest.

« A noble steed is Pegasus,

Who needs nor groom nor oats;
«And the elfin pages of Fancy seek

At his hand no tinselled coats,
"And the fertile realm of cloud she tills
"Craves not or plough or steers-
« But a sterner fate shall track thy path
"In the flight of «Thirty years.»

Too well doth the ancient seer foretell-
Not ten brief years are fled-

But the poet's strain is heard no more-
In shadows lies his head.

With fearless hand the shield he smote
At the Temple-gate of Fame-

And the echoes rang from the inmost shrine
At the youthful stranger's name.

But the cold world scorned his gentle voice
And his dreamy song belied-

He brake the lyre of his boyhood's day
And bowed to earth and died. (')

(*) John Keats.

SEPHARDIM;

OR

THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.

BY JAMES FINN.

Sephardim is the title of an interesting and unpretending volume on the history of the Jews in Spain and Portugal, from their first appearance in the Peninsula to their expulsion from it by the most Catholic sovereigns of Castile and Arragon, It traces their various fortunes under the generally tolerant sway of the Roman empire, their depressed and perilous existence under the Gothic monarchy, their free and prosperous condition in the brilliant era of the Arabs, and their renewed sufferings and final banishment when the Peninsula was again brought under one government and one faith. It exhibits them under the opposite aspects of agriculturists and merchants, as the rulers of their own communities, or the ministers of state and finance to their Christian or Moorish masters; at one time resuming, under the protection of the crescent, their oriental splendour and stateliness; at another, under the oppression of the cross, as the servants of servants, or veiling their ineradicable Hebraism beneath the strange guise of monks, bishops, or inquisitors. It displays their singular proficiency in some departments of science and literature, and their equally singular rejection of other elements of European civilization. Recent events have once more

drawn attention to the Hebrew people both in Europe and Asia, and we shall perhaps lay before many of our readers' both new and interesting matter by a brief survey of some portions of the annals of the Sephardim.

The history of modern Europe, indeed, during the dark and mediæval periods, is incomplete without occasional notices of a race, which, from its wide dispersion and the tenacity of its national ties, was for many ages a principal channel of commercial and diplomatic communication from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. But the historians of modern Judaism usually combine the records of the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews, with those of the Ashkenazim, or Jews of Germany, Britain and Poland. It is obvious, however, that both in his social relations and intellectual character, the Hebrew of Granada in the twelfth, and of Castile in the fourteenth century, differed materially from his countrymen and contemporaries in the half-civilized or wholly bar barous regions of central and northern Europe. The Arab claimed-and the Hebrew admitted the claim-a common descent through Ishmael from Abraham the father of the faithful. The unitarian creed and simple ritual of Islam offended the prejudices of the Jew much less than the Catholic and image-worship of the 'mediæval church. In his oriental habits, his Semitic dialect, and in many

of the principles of the Koran, the Mohammed accorded with the Hebrew, and from gratitude or policy the western caliphs were mostly lenient rulers, and frequently bountiful patrons of the Sephardim. The physical circumstances also of soil, climate, and population in Spain were favourable to the development of the Hebrew character. The Keltic and Phoenician elements that in the south of the Peninsula modified the temper and institutions of the Gothic settlers, had no distant affinity with a people whom a hard destiny alone severed from the East. In the Moorish capitals Granada, Seville and Toledo, the exiles beheld a lively image of the populous towns which were once spread over their native Palestine; and the Mediterranean, the high-road of their active traffic, preserved and renovated their oriental associa

tions, by afiording an easy intercourse with their brethren in Bagdad and Cairo.

It is needless to dwell on the opposite picture of the trembling and servile Jew of northern Europe. Barabbas, Shylock and Isaac of York are faithful impersonations of the Ashkenazim; nor is there a more remarkable contrast in the history of social life, than that between the slavish and vindictive usurer or leech of Frankfort or London and his contemporaries at Cordova, Joseph Ben Ephraim the treasurer, and Samuel Ben Waker the physician, of Alonso VIII. It is among the Sephardim, under the Arabian dynasty in Spain, that we discover the genuine lineaments of the Hebrew exile; and the contrast is heightened by the iron age of oppression from which he emerged; and to which he returned respectively under his Gothic and Catholic rulers.

The author of Sephardim' has drawn his narrative from a variety of chronicles. His Notices of Jewish Literature and Rabbinical Biography' are mainly taken from the Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica' of Fr. Bartoloccio, and the 'Dizionario Storico degli Autori Ebrei' of de Rossi; and his view of «Talmudic Judaism is considerably influenced by a recent work called The Old Paths,' by Dr. M'Caul. His work does not aspire to a higher rank than that of compilation; but Mr. Finn has not sufficiently apprised his readers of the insecure ground of some of his authorities, especially of Mariana, to whom he frequently gives, as at p. 66, rather easy credence; and his mode of reference is provokingly lax and indefinite. Should Sephardim' reach a second edition, we recommend a careful revision of the notes, an enlargement of the appendix, and a retrenchment of certain exuberancies of diction. While however we mark these defects, we gladly bear testimony to the candid and enlightened spirit of the volume before us, and cordially assent to its frequent denunciations of the wickedness and impolicy of intolerance.

6

The first settlement of the Jews in the Peninsula is involved in doubt, and still more obscured by fable. The identity of Tarshish with Tartessus-of which the author might have derived further evidence from the commentators on Herodotus