stranger to her, and he makes himself the tyrant of his neighbor.

But it is not man alone who refuses to know this daughter of heaven,
Nature denies pity, too, and shows herself relentless:

"O world! House of mourning, valley of weeping! Thy rivers are
tears, and thy soil ashes. Upon thy surface thou bearest men that
mourn, and in thy bowels the corpses of the dead.... From out of
the mountains covered with snow and ice comes forth a chariot
with none to guide. Within sits man and the wife of his bosom,
beautiful as a flower, and at their knees play sweet children.
Alas! a caravan of the dead simulating life! They journey on, and
they go astray, and perish on the icy fields."

Distress round about, and all hopes collapsed, death hovers apart, yet
near, remorseless, threatening, and in the end victorious.

In another poem, entitled "The Weeping Woman", his subject is pity
again. He cries out:

"Thy enemy [cruelty] is stronger than thou. If thou art a burning
fire, she is a current of icy water!... Alas for thee, O pity!
Where is he that will have pity upon thee?"

With a few vigorous strokes, the Hebrew poet describes the nothingness
of man in the face of the vast world. The lot of the Hamlets and of the
Renes is more enviable than that of the "Mourner" of the ghetto. They at
least taste of life before becoming a prey to melancholy and delivering
themselves up to pessimism. They know the charms of living and its
vexations. The disappointed son of the ghetto lays no stress on