y
than national grief. His only composition of a nationalistic character,
"The Wailing of the Daughter of Judah," seems strangely out of harmony
with the accompanying odes which celebrate the coronation of Nicholas I.
and similar patriotic occasions, although the "Wailing" is shrewdly
prefaced by a note, evidently meant for the censor, to the effect that
the poem refers to the Middle Ages. At any rate, the principal merit of
the "Songs in the Sacred Tongue" is not to be sought in their poetry but
rather in their style, for it was this style which became the basis of
Neo-Hebraic poetic diction, perfected more and more by the poets of the
succeeding generations.

[Footnote 1: He assumed the pen-name "Adam," the initials of Abraham Dob
(Hebrew equivalent for Baer) Mikhailishker (from the town of
Mikhailishok, in the government of Vilna, where he resided for a number
of years). See later, p. 226.]

[Footnote 2: The author refers to Naphtali Hirz Wessely (d. 1805), an
associate of Mendelssohn in his cultural endeavors. He wrote _Shire
Tif'eret_, "Songs of Glory," an epic in five parts dealing with the
Exodus. The poem was patterned after the epic _Der Messias_ of his
famous German contemporary Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock, who, in turn,
was influenced by Milton.]

Ginzburg and Lebensohn were the central pillars of the Vilna Maskilim
circle, which also included men of the type of Samuel Joseph Fuenn, the
historian, Mattathiah Strashun, the Talmudist, the censor Tugendhold,
the bibliographer Ben-jacob, N. Rosenthal, in a word, the "radicals" of
that era--for the mere striving for the restoration of biblical Hebrew
and for elementary secular education was looked upon as bold radicalism.
The same circle made an attempt to create a scientific periodical after
the pattern of similar publications in Galicia and Germany, In 1841 and
1843 two issues of the magazine _Pirhe Tzafon_, "Flowers of the North,"
appeared in Vilna, under Fuenn's editorship. The volumes contained
scientific and publicistic articles as well as poems, contributed by the
feeble literary talents which were then active in the Hebrew literary
and educational revival in Russia--all of them efforts of not very high
merit. But even these poor hot-house flowers were fated to be nipped in
the Northern chill. The ruthless Russian censorship scented in the
unassuming magazine of the Vilna Maskilim a criminal attempt to publish
a Hebrew periodical. Such an undertaking re