secution, and laments for Zion, follow each other in
kaleidoscopic succession. Unfortunately, there never was lack of
historic matter for this poetry to elaborate. To furnish that was the
well-accomplished task of rulers and priests in the middle ages, alike
"in the realm of the Islamic king of kings and in that of the apostolic
servant of servants." So fate made this poetry classical and eminently
national. Those characteristics which, in general literature, earn for a
work the description "Homeric," in Jewish literature make a liturgical
poem "Kaliric," so called from the poet Eliezer Kalir, the subject of
many mythical tales, and the first of a long line of poets, Spanish,
French, and German, extending to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
The literary history of this epoch has been written by Leopold Zunz with
warmth of feeling and stupendous learning. He closes his work with the
hope that mankind, at some future day, will adopt Israel's religious
poetry as its own, transforming the elegiac _Selicha_ into a joyous
psalm of universal peace and good-will.

Side by side with religious flourishes secular poetry, clothing itself
in rhyme and metre, adopting every current form of poesy, and treating
of every appropriate subject. Its first votary was Solomon Gabirol, that

"Human nightingale that warbled
Forth her songs of tender love,
In the darkness of the sombre,
Gothic mediaeval night.

She, that nightingale, sang only,
Sobbing forth her adoration,
To her Lord, her God, in heaven,
Whom her songs of praise extolled."[7]

Solomon Gabirol may be said to have been the first poet thrilled by
_Weltschmerz_. "He produced hymns and songs, penitential prayers,
psalms, and threnodies, filled with hope and longing for a blessed
future. They are marked throughout by austere earnestness, brushing
away, in its rigor, the color and bloom of life; but side by side with
it, surging forth from the deepest recesses of a human soul, is humble
adoration of God."

Gabirol was a distinguished philosopher besides. In 1150, his chief
work, "The Fount of Life," was translated into Latin by Archdeacon
Dominicus Gundisalvi, with the help of Johannes Avendeath, an apostate
Jew, the author's name being corrupted into Avencebrol, later becoming
Avicebron. The work was made a text-book of scholastic philosophy, but
neither Scotists nor Thomists, neither adherents nor detractors,
suspected that a heretical Je