been, not as their brains, weighed down by misery and befogged by
ignorance, pictured it to have been. He showed them, not the Judea of
the Rabbis, of the pious, and the ascetics, but the land blessed by
nature, the land where men took joy in living, the land of life, flowing
with gaiety and love, the land of the Song of Songs and of Ruth. He drew
Isaiah for them, not as a saintly Rabbi or a teller of mystical dreams,
but a poetic Isaiah, patriot, sublime moralist, the prophet of a free
Judea, the preacher of earthly prosperity, of goodness, and justice,
opposing the narrow doctrines and minute and senseless ceremonialism
inculcated by the priests, who were the predecessors of the Rabbis.

The lesson of the novel is an exhortation to return to a natural life.
It presents a world of pleasure, of feeling, of joyous living, justified
and idealized in the name of the past. It sets forth the charms of rural
life in a succession of poetic pictures. Judea, the pastoral land,
passes under the eyes of the reader. The blithe humor of the vine-
dressers, the light-heartedness of the shepherds, the popular festivals
with their outbursts of joy and high spirits, are reproduced with
masterly skill. The moral grandeur of Judea appears in the magnificent
description of a whole people assembled to celebrate the Feast in the
Holy City, and in the impassioned discourses of the prophets, who openly
criticise the great and the priests in the name of justice and truth.
But especially it is love that pervades the work, love, chaste and
ingenuous, apotheosized in the relation of Amnon and Tamar.

The impression that was made by the book is inconceivable. It can be
compared with nothing less than the effect produced by the publication
of the _Nouvelle Heloise_.

At last the Hebrew language had found the master who could make the