ther way can the joyousness
of his drinking-songs be accounted for. The following are
characteristic:

"Wine cooleth man in summer's heat,
And warmeth him in winter's sleet.
My buckler 'tis 'gainst chilling frost,
My shield when rays of sun exhaust."

"If men will probe their inmost heart,
They must condemn their crafty art:
For silver pieces they make bold
To ask a drink of liquid gold."

To his mistress, naturally, many a stanza of witty praise and coaxing
imagery was devoted:

"My love is like a myrtle tree,
When at the dance her hair falls down.
Her eyes deal death most pitiless,
Yet who would dare on her to frown?"

"Said I to sweetheart: 'Why dost thou resent
The homage to thy grace by old men paid?'
She answered me with question pertinent:
'Dost thou prefer a widow to a maid?'"

To his love-poems and drinking-songs must be added his poems of
friendship, on true friends, life's crowning gift, and false friends,
basest of creatures. He has justly been described as the most subjective
of neo-Hebraic poets. His blithe delight in love, exhaling from his
poems, transfigured his ready humor, which instinctively pierced to the
ludicrous element in every object and occurrence: age dyeing its hair,
traitorous friendship, the pride of wealth, or separation of lovers.

Yet in the history of synagogue literature this poet goes by the name
_Ha-Sallach_, "penitential poet," on account of his many religious
songs, bewailing in elegiac measure the hollowness of life, and the
vanity of earthly possessions, and in ardent words advocating humility,
repentance, and a contrite heart. The peculiarity of Jewish humor is
that it returns to its tragic source.

No mediaeval poet so markedly illustrates this characteristic as the
prince of neo-Hebraic poetry, Yehuda Halevi, in whose poems the
principle of Jewish national poesy attained its completest expression.
They are the idealized reflex of the soul of the Jewish people, its
poetic emotions, its "making for righteousness," its patriotic love of
race, its capacity for martyrdom. Whatever true and beautiful element
had developed in Jewish soul life, since the day when Judah's song first
rang out in Zion's accents on Spanish soil, greets us in its noblest
garb in his poetry. A modern poet[48] says of him:

"Ay, he was a master singer,
Brilliant pole star of his age,
Light and beacon to his