Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down

And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"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 remem-
brance green.

How came they here? What burst of Chris

tian 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 for ever 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.

OLIVER BASSELIN.

In the Valley of the Vire

Still is seen an ancient mill,

With its gables quaint and queer, And beneath the window-sill,

On the stone,

These words alone:

"Oliver Basselin lived here."

Far above it, on the steep,

Ruined stands the old Château;

Nothing but the donjon-keep

Left for shelter or for show.

Its vacant eyes

Stare at the skies,

Stare at the valley green and deep.