records,--unquestionably her finest work in grasp and scope, and,
above all, in moral elevation and purport. The scene is laid in
Nordhausen, a free city in Thuringia, where the Jews, living, as the
deemed, in absolute security and peace, were caught up in the wave of
persecution that swept over Europe at that time. Accused of poisoning
the wells and causing the pestilence, or black death, as it was called,
they were condemned to be burned.

We do not here intend to enter upon a critical or literary analysis
of the play, or to point out dramatic merits or defects, but we
should like to make its readers feel with us the holy ardor and
impulse of the writer and the spiritual import of the work. The
action is without surprise, the doom fixed from the first; but so
glowing is the canvas with local and historic color, so vital and
intense the movement, so resistless, the "internal evidence," if we
may call it thus, penetrating its very substance and form, that we are
swept along as by a wave of human sympathy and grief. In contrast
with "The Spagnoletto," how large is the theme and how all-embracing
the catastrophe! In place of the personal we have the drama of
the universal. Love is only a flash now,--a dream caught sight of
and at once renounced at a higher claim.


"Have you no smile to welcome love with, Liebhaid?
Why should you tremble?
Prince, I am afraid!
Afraid of my own heart, my unfathomed joy,
A blasphemy against my father's grief,
My people's agony!