But at length the feverish day
Like a passion died away,
And the night, serene and still,
Fell on village, vale, and hill.

Then the moon, in all her pride,

Like a spirit glorified,

Filled and overflowed the night

With revelations of her light.

And the Poet's song again

Passed like music through my brain;

Night interpreted to me

All its grace and mystery.

13*

THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT.

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,

Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves,

At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their

sleep

Wave their broad curtains in the south

wind's breath,

While underneath such leafy tents they keep

The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,

That pave with level flags their burial-place,

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

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 ob

scure,

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 wher

e'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,