t the first one, Satan stepped up to him, leading a lamb, a
lion, a pig, and an ape, to teach him that so long as man does not drink
wine, he is innocent as a lamb; if he drinks temperately, he is as
strong as a lion; if he indulges too freely, he sinks to the level of
swine; and as for the ape, his place in the poetry of wine is as well
known to us as to the rabbis of old.

With the approach of the great catastrophe destined to annihilate
Israel's national existence, humor and spontaneity vanish, to be
superseded by seriousness, melancholy, and bitter plaints, and the
centuries of despondency and brooding that followed it were not better
calculated to encourage the expression of love and humor. The pall was
not lifted until the Haggada performed its mission as a comforter. Under
its gentle ministrations, and urged into vitality by the religious needs
of the synagogue, the poetic instinct awoke. _Piut_ and _Selicha_
replaced prophecy and psalmody as religious agents, and thenceforth the
springs of consolation were never permitted to run dry. Driven from the
shores of the Jordan and the Euphrates, Hebrew poetry found a new home
on the Tagus and the Manzanares, where the Jews were blessed with a
second golden age. In the interval from the eleventh to the thirteenth
century, under genial Arabic influences, Andalusian masters of song
built up an ideal world of poetry, wherein love and humor were granted
untrammelled liberty.

To the Spanish-Jewish writers poetry was an end in itself. Along with
religious songs, perfect in rhythm and form, they produced lyrics on
secular subjects, whose grace, beauty, harmony, and wealth of thought
rank them with the finest creations of the age. The spirit of the
prophets and psalmists revived in these Spanish poets. At their head
stands Solomon ibn Gabirol, the Faust of Saragossa, whose poems are the
first tinged with _Weltschmerz_, that peculiar ferment characteristic of
a modern school of poets.[47] Our accounts of Gabirol's life are meagre,
but they leave the clear impression that he was not a favorite of
fortune, and passed a bleak childhood and youth. His poems are pervaded
by vain longing for the ideal, by lamentations over deceived hopes and
unfulfilled aspirations, by painful realization of the imperfection and
perishability of all earthly things, and the insignificance and
transitoriness of life, in a word, by _Weltschmerz_, in its purest,
ideal form, not merely self-deception and